State Traditions and Language Regimes 9780773544833, 9780773544840, 9780773582897, 9780773582941

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State Traditions and Language Regimes

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State Traditions and Language Regimes EDITED BY

Linda Cardinal and Selma K. Sonntag

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston | London | Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015

isbn 978-0-7735-4483-3 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-4484-0 (paper) isbn 978-0-7735-8289-7 (epdf ) isbn 978-0-7735-8294-1 (epub )

Legal deposit second quarter 2015 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100 ancient forest free (100 post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication State traditions and language regimes / edited by Linda Cardinal and Selma K. Sonntag. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-4483-3 (bound). – isbn 978-0-7735-4484-0 (pbk.). – isbn 978-0-7735-8289-7 (epdf ). – isbn 978-0-7735-8294-1 (epub) 1. Language policy. 2. Language and languages – Political aspects.  I. Cardinal, Linda, 1959–, editor II. Sonntag, Selma K., editor

p119.3.s 73 2015

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Conte nt s

Introduction: State Traditions and Language Regimes: Conceptualizing Language Policy Choices | 3 SELMA K . SONNTAG AND LINDA CARDINAL

PA R T O N E | CO NTO U R S

1 State Tradition and Language Regime in Canada | 29 LINDA CARDINAL

2 State Tradition and Language Regime in the United States: Time for Change? | 44 SELMA K . SONNTAG

3 The Irish Language Regime and Language Ideology in Ireland | 62 JOHN WALSH

4 Poland’s Language Regime Governing Kashubian and Silesian | 79 ROMAN SZUL

5 Language Policies, Globalization, and Global English: Bringing the State Back In | 97 PETER IVES

PA R T T WO | COAL IT IO N S

6 Bureaucratic Language Regimes in Multilingual States: Comparing Belgium and Canada | 119 LUC TURGEON AND ALAIN-G. GAGNON

7 The Politics of Language Regime: A Comparative Analysis of Southeast Asia | 137 AMY H. LIU

8 Mandarin State Tradition and Language Regime Change in Taiwan | 154 JEAN-FRANÇOIS DUPRÉ

9 State Tradition and Regional Languages in France: The Case of Basque | 170 JEAN-BAPTISTE HARGUINDÉGUY AND X ABIER ITÇAINA

PA R T TH R E E | CO M P O N E N T S

10 Canada’s Official Languages Policy and the Federal Public Service | 191 HELAINA GASPARD

11 India’s Language Regime: The Eighth Schedule | 205 ASHA SARANGI

12 State Tradition, Language, and Education Policies in France | 219 NURIA GARCIA

13 The Language Politics of Peace-Building | 237 CATHERINE BAKER

Postscript: Reflections on States and the Uses of Language Policy | 253 WILLIAM SAFRAN

Contributors | 269 Index | 275

vi | Contents

State Traditions and Language Regimes

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I ntrod u ctio n

State Traditions and Language Regimes: Conceptualizing Language Policy Choices S E LMA K . S O NNTAG AN D L INDA C AR D INAL

Language policies are political. They have political and social consequences. Language policies can reinforce or diffuse conflict between language groups. They can be instruments of inclusion or exclusion. They can promote solidarity or stoke intolerance. They can be implicated in civil strife and war, imperialism, and global hegemony, or contribute to peace and intercultural dialogue. They can be blunt instruments of power or enveloped in normative discourse. They can be overt or covert. They can have a significant impact on people’s lives in schools, in public services, in the economy, in the daily plebiscite that Ernest Renan so famously evoked. They can determine who belongs to a community, be it local, regional, national, or global. They can discriminate against or empower linguistic minorities and immigrant groups. They can accelerate language loss or facilitate language revitalization. Studies of language policies from a number of disciplinary perspectives that we can group under the rubric of sociolinguistics have produced a wealth of descriptive research on the effects of language policies (see, e.g., Fishman and Garcia 2010; Schiffman 1996; Spolsky 2004; Weinstein 1983).¹ In the last decade, political philosophers have contributed important studies of the normative implications of language policies (see, e.g., Kymlicka and Patten 2003). With this volume, we seek to shift focus by studying language policy choices from a political science perspective. We contend that language policies have not only political consequences, but also political origins. How and why are language policy choices made and how do they come about? The premise of this volume is that a framework that employs the concepts of “state tradition” and “language regime,” derived from political science, can help us understand language policy choices.

S TAT E T R A DI T I ON S

“State tradition” is a familiar conceptual framework in political science, spawning analytical tools such as path dependency and critical junctures. Our use of state tradition is informed by the historical institutionalism approach in political science. Political institutions have long been an object of study in political science, although the behavioural revolution in social sciences, most apparent in the United States, effected a veering away from institutions toward analysis of individual behaviour in the 1950s and ’60s. In political science, this led to a focus on individual and group interests as the driving force in politics. When Theda Skocpol and others argued for “bringing the state back in” in the 1980s, they launched a “new institutionalism” approach, which incorporated a contextual analysis in the study of the role of state (Evans, Rueschmeyer, and Skocpol 1985; Hall and Taylor 1996). While states do react to demands and pressures from society, historical institutionalism suggests that they have a relative degree of autonomy. That autonomy, we argue, is best defined in terms of state traditions – the institutional and normative baggage and patterns of state action. France, a state born of revolution, enacts policies today that are still justified by its Jacobin roots. India self-identifies as a post-colonial state, although the weight of colonial legacy is still visible today in state actions. India also shares with Anglo-American states institutions rooted in a liberal ideology, distinct from the social democratic tradition of continental Europe. The geographic expanse of the United States, the political and linguistic landscapes of Canada, and the cultural diversity of India are the contexts for the evolution of these states’ institutional structure of federalism. Such normative and institutional state traditions mark the path that states take in policy-making. Path dependency is an analytical tool to link state traditions to policy choices. The state-tradition approach has been developed in European comparative political science through the study of “new” territorial patterns of governance, as evidenced by small nations and regional governments in Europe en face of a global economy (Keating 1998; Loughlin 2005; Keating, Loughlin, and Deschouwer 2003). This research points to the everchanging context in which state traditions are embedded. Policy pathways may depend on state traditions, but policy choices are often made at junctions in the path. “Critical junctures” is an analytical tool political scientists use to home in on pivotal points of interaction between tradition and

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policy. A critical juncture may be presented by social, political, economic, or environmental crises or dramatic change. Most recently, globalization has precipitated critical junctures. Major historical shifts such as decolonization, war, redrawing national borders, the dissolution of old states, and the emergence of new states have instigated critical junctures. At critical junctures, state traditions are often reinvented. What emerge are new patterns of governance – but ones never completely divorced from the old. Our use of state tradition as a conceptual framework for understanding language policy choices means that we look at the dynamic context – historical, institutional, normative – in which the state chooses language policies. State tradition as a conceptual framework directs us to raise questions such as: What are the principles that inform state actions on language matters? What are the institutional and administrative parameters of how the state governs languages? How and why does the state intervene in language choice and language use? State traditions guide the path dependency of language policy choices; they frame how those choices are conceived (Jobert and Muller 1987; Muller 2000). However, they do not predetermine language policy choices, whether at the global, national, regional, or local level. In this sense, then, our concept of state tradition problematizes linguistic homogenization in service of nation-building as the singular pathway. It broadens the research agenda to include analyses of language policy choices that grate against the default nation-state model.² L A NGUA GE R EG I MES

Our concept of “language regime” is derived from Jane Jenson’s compelling work on citizenship regimes (see, e.g., Jenson and Phillips 1996). Jenson and her colleagues use a “neo-institutionalist approach” to analyze how the transformation in the Canadian political economy from Fordism to neo-liberalism has affected conceptions and practices of citizenship (Jenson and Phillips 2001, 71). These conceptions and practices, embedded in political economy, constitute a regime. Important to Jenson’s discussion is that conceptions and practices are subject to change. She argues that conceiving of citizens as members of collectivities in civil society, rooted in the collectivist consensus that emerged in many Western democracies after World War ii , has given

Introduction | 5

way to conceiving of citizens as individuals. State policies have changed from responding to collectivities’ needs and demands to enabling individual agency. Individuals are empowered under neo-liberalism to make political claims on the state, which results in a dismantling of civil society where groups of individuals with common interests were collectively empowered. What makes Jenson’s concept of citizenship regimes particularly robust is that she links how citizenship is practiced with how it is conceived. Furthermore, she links state practices and conceptions to citizens’ practices and conceptions. Hence, for Jenson (2000, 232), a citizenship regime is “institutional arrangements, rules and understandings that guide and shape [not only] concurrent policy decisions … [and] problem definitions by states,” but also “problem definitions by … citizens, and claims-making by citizens.” This state-society linkage “encodes within it a paradigmatic representation” of citizens’ identity and social relations between citizens and the state (Jenson and Phillips 2001, 72). In other words, a citizenship regime comprises not only institutions and rules but also a certain understanding of citizenship that informs the state’s decision-making and commitments as well as the way citizens give meaning to their claims (Dobrowolsky and Jenson 2004, 156). We propose to reconfigure Jenson’s concept of a citizenship regime to analyze language policy choices. In our conceptual framework, we posit that a language regime refers to language practices as well as conceptions of language and language use as projected through state policies and as acted upon by language users. State traditions guide and frame those practices and conceptions.³ In turn, language users act on them. Consider, for the sake of simplicity, a monolingual language regime informed by a Herderian state tradition of one-language-one-nation. Such a regime would define language use in terms of a single national language. Language policies would reflect that definition and, for example, restrict the medium of instruction in schools to the national language. Most language users would adhere to the conception of a single language as the national one and would act accordingly. Speakers of languages other than the national language would most likely experience language shift – that is, the intergenerational abandonment of one language by its speakers for another. In this case, language shift would indicate the “encod[ing] of the proper and legitimate social relations” (Jenson 2000, 232) among a category of language users whose language is not recognized by the state policy. These linguistic minorities are disempowered. They seek empowerment by

6 | Selma K. Sonntag and Linda Cardinal

changing their language to fit with the dominant representations. Their understanding of empowerment is embedded in the language regime. Such regimes empower certain language users more than others to make political claims on the state.⁴ This simple example presents a stable language regime. Jenson (2000, 233) characterizes “a stable regime as one in which the status proffered and the status anticipated match.” In the case of language regimes, if the status proffered to users of a particular language matches their anticipations, then we can expect stability. In our above example, if language shift does lead to empowerment, then we would expect the language regime to be stable. Whether there is a match or mismatch between proffered status and anticipated status is a hotly debated topic in language policy studies. Does language shift lead to economic and political empowerment for those who undertake it, or is it a false promise (see Pogge 2003; May 2003)? Prominent in this debate is the case of an emerging global language regime. Does global English actually confer the status it seems to project (see Sonntag 2003; Wright 2004)? When there is a mismatch, there is an opening for “regime redesign”; critical to this redesign are “strategic choices about policy and alliances” (Jenson 2000, 232). In our study of language regimes in this volume, a number of contributors analyze “coalitions” formed around strategic language policy choices that effect language regime change (see part 2). Often these coalitions appear at critical junctures, when the state traditions that underpin the language regime are vulnerable. As discussed above, critical junctures can be precipitated by revolution, war, decolonization, and political or economic crises. They can also be precipitated by less dramatic events, such as globalization, reflecting, as Jenson argues, a reconfiguration along neo-liberal lines. Such events often reconfigure power relations by changing the status of language use embedded in a language regime. For example, the aftermath of World War i and the enlargement of the franchise in Belgium led to a majority coalition in favour of language regime change based on enhancing the status of Flemish vis-à-vis French (Sonntag 1991). The concept of language regimes enables us to analyze regime change. It allows for a dynamic analysis. The concept of language regime engages and, we would argue, encompasses the more familiar concepts of language ideology and linguistic hegemony found in language policy studies (see Schiefflin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998; Dua 1994; Ives 2004; Macedo, Dendrinos, and Gounari

Introduction | 7

2003; Sonntag 2003; Woolard 1985). Language ideology refers to the conceptualizations of language use: to “multiple and contending perceptions, beliefs, attitudes and modes of reasoning about language policy issues” (Sonntag and Pool 1987, 47). However, language ideology as a concept in and of itself does not elicit an analysis of how state traditions have framed conceptions of language. Nor does it elicit theorizing the linkage between conceptions and practices. The concept of language regime builds on language ideology by analyzing the practices through which that ideology manifests. Conceptions of language use are projected through actions of the state and are reinforced through political claims made by language users. Claims that resonate with the language regime are deemed legitimate and appropriate, and likely to be entertained by the state. Claims framed in terms of state traditions are more likely to resonate (Guigni 2002). The concept of linguistic hegemony has more analytical purchase than that of language ideology. Hegemony is a broad concept used to analyze the construction of consent: how certain groups and institutions maintain their power over others through culture and ideology (Laclau and Mouffe 1985).⁵ Linguistic hegemony elicits an analytical focus on power relations implied in most language ideologies. It also focuses attention on the discursive strategies by which language ideologies become generally accepted by the majority of the population in any given society (see, e.g., Heller and Duchêne 2007). The concept of language regime moves beyond discourse analysis to include analysis of the institutional and administrative mechanisms and policy instruments of domination, or what Amy H. Liu (2009, 24) refers to as “institutionalizing the distribution of linguistic powers.” It weds an ideational analysis to an institutional analysis. Language regimes are not only socially constructed but also institutionally and historically constructed. The concept of state traditions facilitates analyzing languages regimes as institutional constructs and, just as importantly, as historical constructs, in addition to analyzing them as social constructs. Thus, we are adding a historical institutional dimension to the study of language policy choices by employing the conceptual framework of state traditions and language regimes. Finally, the robustness of the concept of language regimes advances the analysis of counter-hegemony. Language regimes are most often not internally consistent in terms of conceptions and practices of language use, as the power relations underlying language regimes and embodied in state

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traditions are not static. A hegemonic regime implies that there is a mismatch between proffered status and anticipated status. Hegemonic discursive practices attempt to mask the mismatch, while counter-hegemonic challenges expose it, and reconfigure conceptions of language in the process. Advocacy is geared toward changing practices and policies as well, thereby disrupting power relations and, by implication, state traditions. Language regimes’ inconsistencies and incongruences are often marked by contradictions and cross-purposes of specific practices and/or conceptions of language choice and use. For example, language policy choices for education could differ from or reinforce language use and choice in the bureaucracy. At times, the variation is significant enough to warrant analyses of language regimes in the plural. How well language policy choices articulate with other public policies, such as education, immigration, economic, and health policies, can indicate the degree of stability and change of a language regime. In analyzing these inconsistencies and incongruences, we can conceive of specific practices and conceptions as components of a language regime: a language regime is comprised of practices and conceptions of language and language use, as posited above. By focusing on the goals, targets, and means of specific components of a language regime, we can describe and deconstruct such regimes in terms of the underlying power relations embodied in state traditions. Language regimes, along with state traditions, provide a conceptual framework in which we can analyze language policy choices in terms of dynamic power relations. L A NGUA GE P OLI T I CS A N D P O LI T I CA L SCI ENCE

Our conceptual framework of state traditions and language regimes is grounded in political science. Yet political science has not been at the forefront of scholarship and debates on language policies, despite the fact that public policy and state action, especially since the 1980s, have become a major area of research in the discipline (Skocpol 1985; Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth 1992; Pierson 1994; Lecours 2005; Peters 2005). Even with the normative turn brought about by political philosophy and its recent interest in diversity issues, language policy choices remain understudied by political scientists. As of the time of our writing this introduction, Will Kymlicka and Alan Patten’s (2003) edited collection Language Rights and Political Theory is among the few books in political science published on

Introduction | 9

language rights and language policy.⁶ As mentioned at the outset of this introduction, our research agenda differs from political theorists’: we seek to understand the politics of language policy choices rather than focus on the normative effects of language policy. We draw on the political science sub-disciplines of comparative politics, political sociology, and public policy and advocacy, rather than political theory. In seeking to rectify this dearth of political science analysis of language policy, we contend that there is no valid reason why political scientists should underestimate the importance of language policy choices. Nevertheless, we need to account for this neglect. We provide two related potential explanations. First, with the growing popularity of modernization theory in the 1950s and ’60s, many political scientists took for granted that minority languages would eventually disappear with the development of the modern, industrialized nation-state, underpinned by capitalism and democracy at least in those societies that had achieved modernization (Deutsch 1953; Inglehart and Woodward 1962). As William Safran (2010) notes, it was assumed in the literature that democracy required a monolingual and monocultural citizen, based on its historical development in the West, which was taken as the teleological endpoint of modernization theory. Jean Laponce (1984) was among the first to criticize the view that democracy was not compatible with the recognition of minority languages.⁷ Thus, when ethnolinguistic movements burst onto the political scene in a number of Western democracies, such as Canada, Belgium, and even Britain, beginning in the late 1960s, it was no surprise that many political scientists did not know how to interpret them (see Esman 1977). The tools available at the time were informed by a paradigm that had little regard for language movements and demands. Language politics was not on the radar of mainstream political science. Second, we might argue that those who set the tone in political science still do not question their privileged position of working in dominant languages and within societies where a single language is likely to dominate (Safran 2010). Political science has tended to adopt a majoritarian understanding of language (see, e.g., Huntington 2004). American political scientists usually take English for granted. Furthermore, political scientists working on diversity issues often fail to consider multiculturalism as including multilingualism (Safran 2010). This may help explain why political scientists have left the field of language policy to social science disciplines

10 | Selma K. Sonntag and Linda Cardinal

that incline toward descriptive studies of linguistic minorities and linguistic diversity. When Skocpol and her colleagues “brought the state back in” to the study of politics in the 1980s, the potential impact on language politics was substantial. As we noted above, the new historical institutionalism is the theoretical premise on which we base our conceptual framework (see Steinmo 2003). Yet few political scientists extended this new paradigm to the study of the politics of language. Those who did study language policy tended to use the case study approach of comparative politics, which often included at best a description of institutional features as background to language politics but rarely employed an institutional analysis (see, e.g., McRae 1983, 1986, 1997; Sonntag 1991; Weinstein 1990).⁸ Comparative political scientists who were area specialists and employed case study analysis increasingly lost ground to rational choice theorists, who have come to dominate political science, particularly in the United States. While few rational choice theorists have analyzed language policy,⁹ David Laitin’s prominence in the field of language politics deserves special note. Laitin (1988; 1992) lays out the “rational” strategies employed by political elites and their mobilization of resources in the language domain. In this approach, there is a subtle shift from language as a problem, characteristic of modernization theory, to language as a political resource. Laitin’s work has been important for a better understanding of the role of language in political competition, particularly among elites. However, he tends to ignore the politics of language policy choices within different state traditions. He uses an ahistorical, instrumentalist approach in which all states are deemed to have only one imperative, that of rationalization and efficiency, which translates to linguistic uniformity as long as political stability is not jeopardized. Rational choice has also been criticized for assuming that ethnic groups, including linguistic groups, are just one more type of interest group. In this model, ethnicity and language are preferences and convictions rather than identities. Hence Laitin’s tendency to downplay the intensity of language conflict, while perhaps helping to diffuse the emotional dimension of language politics, does not always help us understand the role of language issues in state-society relations.¹⁰ Public policy analysis, a prominent subfield of political science, shows promise for the study of language policy, particularly when wedded to an institutional approach (see, e.g., Corbeil 2007). As Jean-Claude Barbier

Introduction | 11

(2012, 7) notes, the “real world” bases of many language communities are defined in terms of social protection, education, administration, and public cultures. Questions of empowerment often centre on whether the state recognizes and serves citizens, in particular minorities, in their own languages. Language policies play an important role in issues of economic solidarity and in the definition of new public cultures, not only at the national level but also, in Europe, at the eu level (Kraus 2008), as well as at the local and regional levels. A public policy approach can help clarify not only how language policy choices are made but also how they interface with other public policy choices, how they are framed and implemented, what populations they target, and how those categories of target populations are constructed (see Schneider and Ingram 1993). Interestingly, much of the analysis from a public policy approach has been conducted by social scientists in disciplines other than political science (see, e.g., Grin 2003 in economics, Gazzola 2014 in communications, and Williams 2007 in geography), although their emphasis has been on implementation and evaluation, not on political origins, of language policy choices. A significant consequence of scholars in other academic disciplines filling in the lacuna created by political science’s relative neglect of language policy research is that the role of the state in language policy choices remains under-conceptualized and under-theorized. “Critical sociolinguistics” (Ricento 2000, 13), which often takes a more political approach to the study of language policy, tends to focus on the consequences of language policy choices for “(in)equality, linguistic discrimination, and language rights” (Tollefson 2002, 3; see also May 2001), rather than the how and why of choices. Those critical sociolinguists who do discuss underlying politics ascribe explanatory power to large “macro sociopolitical” and “macro economic and political forces” (Ricento 2000, 9, 16, 20) such as globalization and imperialism (Phillipson 1992), without analysis of specific political actors such as the state and its institutions or, for example, political parties as intermediaries between the state and society.¹¹ While these sociolinguistic perspectives are among the best in language policy studies, we contend that a political science perspective, such as the one offered in this volume, can further advance the study of language policy by focusing on the how and why of language policy choices. There is therefore a need to reposition the debate about language politics within the discipline of political science. This volume brings a new approach – a political science approach – to the study of language policy.

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Engaging political science as the disciplinary approach is a distinguishing feature of this volume. More specifically, language policy choices are understood and analyzed in terms of state traditions and language regimes. As we argued above, states have complex historical and normative traditions that guide and frame public policies, including language policies. The proposed research agenda in this volume is thus informed by the need for more analyses on the role of the state in state-society patterns of intervention in language choice and use, using the conceptual framework of state traditions and language regimes. LI NGUI S T I C DI VER SI T Y

In inserting a political science perspective into a field of study dominated by other social sciences, particularly by sociolinguistics, we do not intend to overemphasize structural variables at the expense of social agency. While we have argued that state traditions guide language policy choices and frame how those choices are conceived and perceived, our concept of language regime, as developed above, accounts for counter-hegemonic mobilization and strategic language policy choices, leading to regime change and impacting state traditions at critical junctures. We are concerned, however, about the tendency in political science to make assumptions about the nature of society and societal agency and then build deterministic models of the state that reflect a conservative bias toward social change. This conservative bias seems particularly apparent in political science analyses of language policy when contrasted with critical sociolinguistic analyses. Often the problem begins with the assumption that the societal norm is monolingualism and that linguistic diversity is a deviation. This assumption usually stems from ignorance and unfamiliarity – from not realizing that most people in most of the world are multilingual in their everyday lives. There are, of course, exceptions to this tendency even within American political science, despite its propensity to egregiously offend with the likes of Samuel Huntington (2004): Ronald Schmidt, Sr (2000, 1) begins his book on language policy in the United States with the statement, “In the United States, as in virtually every country in the world, multiple languages are spoken.” But other political scientists, including many political theorists, assume that linguistic diversity is not the typical human experience (see note 7 above; and May 2003; Sonntag 2010; and De Schutter 2007 for a fuller discussion). For ex-

Introduction | 13

ample, Jonathan Pool (1990, 257) explicitly assumes “each citizen has one and only one native language” in his formal modelling of “the relationship between language and politics,” and does not contemplate the possibility that native language is itself a social construct congruent with a historicspecific language regime.¹² In contrast, the political science analytical framework we propose is based on the recognition that linguistic diversity is a historical and contemporary fact in many communities, regions, and countries, as well as globally. Thus, despite state traditions that have fostered, particularly in Europe, monolingualism that political scientists tend to assume is natural, and despite global linguistic homogenization that political theorists often defend (see, e.g., Van Parijs 2011), linguistic diversity endures. We believe that a political science perspective such as the one we offer in this volume contributes to a deeper understanding of the state’s language policy choices in governing linguistic diversity locally, nationally, regionally, or globally. The state intervenes in a linguistically diverse society, be it local, national, regional or global, even if the conception of language use framed by state tradition is that of a monolingual speaker. Our analytical concept of language regime allows us to foreground linguistic diversity despite its dismissal in most of the political science literature on language policy. In this sense, then, this volume is not only a significant contribution to political science but also, and perhaps more importantly, to recent studies of language policy by social scientists for whom linguistic diversity is an empirical reality and a normative preference (see, e.g., Kjaer and Adamo 2011; Kraus 2008; May 2013; Romaine forthcoming). C ON TOUR S , C OA LI T I O N S, CO MP O N EN TS

The contributions to this volume represent linguistically diverse scholarship. Contributors flesh out state traditions and language regimes in a variety of contexts and case studies, using and citing sources in Basque, Chinese, English, French, German, Irish, Italian, Kashubian, Polish, and Spanish. We have grouped contributions according to their most prominent focus or emphasis within the conceptual framework developed in this introduction. Contributors in part 1 of the volume emphasize the role of state traditions in language policy choices. They offer the broad contours of how our conceptual framework is to be applied in specific cases.

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Contributors in part 2 focus on the politics of specific language regimes and language regime change. They point to the role of coalitions in and among political parties, institutional settings, civil society, and regional actors in affecting language regime change. Contributors in part 3 hone in on specific components or policies of language regimes. While we recognize that significant portions of the globe, such as Africa and Latin America, are not covered in our case studies, and that we have far more coverage of North America and Western Europe than Eastern Europe, the contributions provide a balance between contours, coalitions, and components, and elucidate our conceptual framework to the fullest. By having, for example, three chapters that focus on Canada – in which the first provides the broad contours, the second analyzes political coalitions and regime change in comparative perspective, and the third addresses specific policy components of Canada’s language regime – we are better able to flesh out our conceptual framework. Below, we introduce the contributions according to our “contours, coalitions, and components” rubric. Part 1 of the volume looks at the broad contours of state traditions and language regimes. Contributors employ for the most part a historical institutionalism approach, analyzing language regimes in Europe, North America, and globally. Their analyses disrupt the assumed determinism between the traditional European nation-state model and a language regime singularly aimed at linguistic homogenization. This section of the volume begins with Linda Cardinal’s (chapter 1) discussion of state traditions in multinational Canada. She suggests that Canada’s language regime since the 1980s has been court-driven, and provides a contextual explanation that looks at the relationship between state tradition and the courts. Although state tradition in Canada broadly fits the British model, there is a unique Canadian approach to language policy choices founded on political compromise. The development of Canada’s language regime has been path-dependent on this tradition. It involves a limited approach to positive state intervention that has been conducive to court challenges. Cardinal concludes that the contemporary moment presents a new critical juncture for Canada’s language regime. How can a language regime that has become so court-driven be sustained? Selma K. Sonntag (chapter 2) identifies liberalism, federalism, and world-power status as the major state traditions in the United States that provide the contours of what she calls a bifurcated language regime. The

Introduction | 15

bifurcation reflects the contradictions between language policy choices that affect languages used domestically and those projected for use in US international affairs. Focusing on the international side of this bifurcated language regime, Sonntag traces the evolution of foreign-language policy marked by critical junctures or what she refers to as “moments” of international political and economic crises. She then analyzes a language policy initiative emanating from policy responses to the 9/11 crisis to suggest the possibility of overcoming the contradictions and incoherency of the United States’ bifurcated language regime in favour of valuing linguistic diversity. In his overview of the Irish language regime, John Walsh (chapter 3) notes its contradictions. Covert as much as overt language policy choices, he argues, make up Ireland’s language regime. Covert policy often reflects language ideology, in Ireland’s case an increasingly prevalent view of Irish as a minority language rather than a national language. Walsh links what he calls a “critical language policy shift” to a shift from nationalism to liberalism as the dominant state tradition guiding Ireland’s language policy choices. His conclusions do not bode well for a vibrant future of Irish. The counter trend, or counter-hegemony, that Walsh identifies is found in civil society. Roman Szul (chapter 4) analyzes the Polish language regime in terms of the nation-state model representing a dominant, if not hegemonic, tradition in Poland. He argues that Poland’s language regime is tiered, with the national language at the apex of the state, and minority and regional languages providing a symbolic accommodation to linguistic diversity. Szul explores the distinction between minority languages and regional languages, with Silesian and Kashubian as his case studies respectively, in terms of Poland’s war-torn history. This history, he suggests, explains the path dependency of Poland’s language policy choices. To conclude, he notes that today in post-communist Poland, Europeanization and a market economy are changing the contours of how regional languages are conceived and practiced: they are now seen as tourism-enhancing commodities. Part 1 of our volume closes with Peter Ives’s (chapter 5) appeal for “bringing the state back in” to debates on global English. With his contribution, we gain insight into state traditions and an emerging global language regime. In a number of social science disciplines, political science

16 | Selma K. Sonntag and Linda Cardinal

included, the state and its traditions are considered obsolete in the new era of globalization. Ives challenges this view. He argues that the state is more important than ever in managing a global language regime characterized by global English, precisely because state traditions, such as nation-building, provide regime norms. He employs the Gramscian categories of “normative” and “spontaneous” grammar to explore the relation between state traditions and language regime at the global level. He concludes by warning us not to dichotomize these categories as hegemonic and counter-hegemonic. Whereas the contributors in part 1 give us the broad contours of state traditions and language regimes, those in part 2 tap the richness that analyses from a political science perspective can provide. Their focus on political competition in both institutional settings and civil society through coalition-building and formation tends toward, at least for some, incorporating more of a rational choice analysis, albeit one that accounts for regime change in institutional contexts. By adding Asian cases into the mix, our conceptual framework’s potential for a broad range of applicability is demonstrated. In the opening contribution, Luc Turgeon and Alain-G. Gagnon (chapter 6) focus on language regimes employed in bureaucracies of multilingual federations, in particular Belgium and Canada. They argue that language regimes are mediated by coalitions that link the institutional context of the state with the representational aspirations of political communities reflected in normative discourse. Their analysis accounts for the how and why of bureaucratic language regimes and for the dynamism that characterizes the evolution and change (path dependency and critical junctures) of language policy choices. In their conclusions, they suggest that the Belgian bureaucracy’s language regime may be more accommodative to linguistic diversity than Canada’s. Amy H. Liu (chapter 7) also takes a comparative approach in her analysis of language regime choice in Southeast Asia. She compares the language regimes of Malaysia and Singapore over time and argues that post-colonial politics, in particular governing coalitions legitimized and empowered by language-based coalitions in civil society, have resulted in, at different critical junctures, different language regimes. Liu typologizes these regimes as power-sharing, power-concentrating, and power-neutralizing. Power-neutralizing language regimes depend on an exogenous lingua

Introduction | 17

franca, whereas power-concentrating regimes attempt to replicate the nation-state model. Power-sharing regimes affirm a normative preference for linguistic diversity. Continuing with Asia, Jean-François Dupré (chapter 8) explores language regime change, or lack thereof, in Taiwan. Taiwan’s state traditions, defined by the 1949 critical juncture when the Kuomintang or National Party fled mainland China to establish political hegemony on the island, have provided Taiwan with a language regime infused with state power but in tension with its linguistic diversity. More recent democratization in Taiwan has opened up the language regime to political bargaining and coalition building, with political parties as the main actors. Surprisingly, this has not yet resulted in language regime change, but rather regime stability along a particular path dependency of an “enduring state tradition of Mandarin unilingualism,” as Dupré puts it. In the last contribution to part 2, Jean-Baptiste Harguindéguy and Xabier Itçaina (chapter 9) analyze the changing language regime governing regional languages in France, focusing on the Basque case. New language policy choices in favour of regional languages opened up as a result of a critical juncture in France’s state tradition: decentralization in the 1980s. Capitalizing on this opening were various civil society coalitions in favour of legitimizing linguistic diversity in a highly centralized nation-state, including in the Basque case “territorial” and “cross border” coalitions with Basque language advocates in Spain. Although the Basque case is promising, Harguindéguy and Itçaina conclude that it is too soon to pronounce a definitve new path in France’s language regime. Part 3 of this volume includes contributions that evaluate specific components or targeted policies of language regimes. As the analyses in this section demonstrate, these components are often not in sync with other components of the language regime, or they expose the contradictions between language policy choices and choices in related policy arenas. The result is that the policies fall short in implementation, reflecting a certain disruption of state tradition. Given their analytical focus, some of the contributors in part 3 draw upon public policy analysis. Once again, Canada’s language regime is the topic of the opening contribution by Helaina Gaspard (chapter 10). Gaspard focuses on the implementation of Canada’s 1969 Official Language Act in the federal public service. She analyzes how Canada’s tradition of employing the “merit prin-

18 | Selma K. Sonntag and Linda Cardinal

ciple” in the civil service overshadowed the language policy goals of the act. She argues that only those policy components of the act that were in sync with the merit principle have endured, while the result falls short of the ability of Canada’s language regime to fully accommodate linguistic diversity. Asha Sarangi (chapter 11) examines one of the most complex case studies of state traditions and language regimes: that of India. To get a handle on this complexity, she focuses on the Eighth Schedule of the Indian constitution, the component of India’s language regime that provides the basis for language rights in multilingual India. Sarangi points to India’s rightsbased democratic tradition to explain the traction that Eighth Schedule languages accrue. She then exposes the contradictions inherent in the Eighth Schedule’s covert hierarchy of languages, given the reality of linguistic rationalization. The result is many of India’s languages being marginalized and a setback for India’s much-heralded linguistic diversity. Nuria Garcia (chapter 12) brings us back to the quintessential nationstate model, France. The context is France’s changing language regime given the critical juncture of Europeanization and economic competition. Garcia analyzes a shift in foreign-language teaching in schools, and argues it reflects pressure on the Jacobin state tradition brought about by globalization. Yet the French Republic falls short of being able to implement this shift, given the weight of state tradition reflected in the path dependency of language policy choices. Garcia examines this shortfall in terms of the contradictions between what are hierarchically categorized as foreign languages and immigrant languages in an increasingly linguistically diverse France. The context for the final contribution to part 3 is international, returning to many of the issues Ives raises in the first section of our volume. Catherine Baker (chapter 13) looks at the language component of peace-building efforts in post-conflict states, with Bosnia-Herzegovina as her primary case study. English is the working language of these peace-building efforts, introduced at the critical juncture of end of conflict. While this fits in with a global English language regime and its accompanying power relations, Baker argues that the reliance on English often undermines what has traditionally been the international community’s main objective: building strong and peaceful democracies and civil societies. Moreover, she argues, English as a component of peace-building is contradicted by

Introduction | 19

local practices marked by linguistic diversity. The success of English as the language policy choice is unlikely given the institutional and normative context of post-conflict societies. Our volume concludes with a postscript by William Safran. One of the foremost political scientists of language policy along with Jean Laponce, Safran has given the study of language politics credibility internationally. With Laponce, he was involved in founding the Research Committee on the Politics of Language (rc 50) of the International Association of Political Science (ipsa ) in 2001. In his postscript, Safran takes our conceptual themes and the topics and cases presented by contributors to weave a complex tapestry made rich by his own expertise in the field. He explores and comments upon different types of state traditions, path dependency, the role of political science, societal circumstances and conditions of language use including lingua francas, language rights and language status, and ethnosymbolism and instrumentalism in the study of language politics. Along with Safran, most authors in this book are active participants of the meetings organized by the ipsa ’s Research Committee on the Politics of Language. Some of the contributors presented their chapters at the rc50 panels at the ipsa World Congress in Madrid in 2012, others at an rc50 conference in Ottawa in 2011. rc50 is one of the few venues where young scholars can present their research on language politics internationally. This newer generation of political scientists studying language politics and language policies is represented in our volume by Catherine Baker, Jean-François Dupré, Nuria Garcia, Helaina Gaspard, and Amy H. Liu. We take this as a positive sign for the repositioning of the study of language policy within political science that we call for in this introduction. The contributions in this volume from more established senior scholars, not all of whom are political scientists, also advance this new research agenda for the study of language policies. Finally, both new and established generations of political scientists represented in this volume provide the systematic contextualization of language policies necessary to make sense of state-society relations in a linguistically diverse world. This book would not have been possible without the assistance of Helaina Gaspard at the University of Ottawa. Our gratitude extends as well to Mark Abley at McGill-Queen’s University Press, who efficiently shepherded our manuscript through the complex publishing process. We are indebted to the three reviewers of our manuscript whose superb and diligent reviews made for a greatly improved final product. We note, however,

20 | Selma K. Sonntag and Linda Cardinal

that responsibility for all remaining shortcomings in this volume lies with us. We also thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Secrétariat aux Affaires intergouvernementales canadiennes of the Government of Quebec, and the Offices of the President and Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Humboldt State University for their financial support.

NOTES

1 We use “sociolinguistics” for want of a better one-word term. Under this rubric, we mean to include those who study language planning and language policy from a number of social science disciplines, including education and curriculum studies. The largest contingent would be applied linguists, many of whom have been trained in formal linguistics. However, we do not mean to include under our rubric those applied linguists who focus on “micro-sociolinguistics,” the social dynamics of, e.g., interpersonal communication, such as Deborah Tannen’s (1990) popular work. 2 Ericka Albaugh’s (2014) fascinating analysis of the lack of compulsion toward linguistic homogenization in African states fits well with the political science approach we are developing here. 3 In his very interesting book on the evaluation of language regimes, Michele Gazzola (2014, 2) defines language regimes as a “particular form of public policy.” For Gazzola (2014, 10), it is a “set of rules and arrangements implemented to manage multilingual communication, typically as regards to the choice of official languages of an organisation and their respective use.” While he applies the concept of language regime to any form of organization, we insist on the central role of the state for the study of a language regime. We also make a case for a historically and politically informed concept in order to better understand the state’s administrative, institutional, and normative traditions in guiding language policy choices. In order to apply it to organizations other than the state, the concept of language regime would still need to be informed by history and politics to make sense of the reasons rules and arrangements are adopted in the first place. 4 Selma K. Sonntag (2010) argues that an emerging global language regime based on liberalism has legitimated individual claims for language rights. This resonates with Jenson’s analysis of neo-liberalism and adds in the global dimension to our conceptual framework. 5 We thank Peter Ives for helping us formulate this idea. 6 It might not be a coincidence that much of the research on language politics came out of Canada, especially during those years that the country was going through a crisis or critical juncture provoked by the growing dissatisfaction of Quebec and French Canadians with the Canadian government. In 1963, the creation of the Royal

Introduction | 21

7

8

9

10

11

12

Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in Canada led to the development of a significant body of research on language policy in which comparative and international references to countries such as Belgium, Finland, or Switzerland represented an important contribution to the study of language politics. That once again, in 2003, a discussion on language policy issues is led by two Canadians, Will Kymlicka and Alan Patten, should not come as a surprise. Today, many democracy theorists are still convinced that democracy is not compatible with multilingualism. In the introduction to their widely acclaimed book on language rights and political theory, Kymlicka and Patten (2003, 40) describe Patten’s contribution to the volume as follows: “As Patten discusses in his contribution to the volume, linguistic diversity can be a significant barrier to the full flourishing of this deliberative dimension of democracy.” See Ives (2010) for a discussion of cosmopolitan democratic theorists making the same point. One political science study of language policy that did take a more institutional approach was Raymond Tatalovich’s (1995) comparison of English-Only legislation in different states within the United States. Given the subdisciplinary divisions of political science in the United States, Tatalovich would be categorized as an Americanist rather than a comparativist. Jonathan Pool (1990) advocates using formal modelling to analyze the relation between language regimes and political regimes. His analysis seeks to disclose the “mechanisms that … drive the behavior of individuals and organizations” (1990, 257), in some ways an even more ahistorical approach than other rational choice theorists. Ethnolinguistic conflict has been, and continues to be, a dominant theme of political science analyses of language politics (see Brass 1974; Brown and Ganguly 2003; Csergo 2007). Most of these studies are “society-centred” and neglect “the explanatory centrality of states,” to use Skocpol’s (1985, 6) terminology. Rainer Enrique Hamel (2010) is among the few sociolinguists to suggest that actors such as the state are making important linguistic choices. More specifically, he argues that critical approaches to the impact of globalization on minority languages are apolitical because they avoid looking at the role of actors such as the nationstate in promoting English. For a compatible argument, see Ives (this volume, ch. 5). See Lisa Mitchell’s (2010) superb Language, Emotion and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue for comparison. Mitchell’s training is in history and anthropology, not political science.

REFERENCES

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Brass, Paul R. 1974. Language, Religion and Politics in North India. London: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Michael E., and Šumit Ganguly, eds. 2003. Fighting Words: Language Policy and Ethnic Relations in Asia. Cambridge, ma : mit Press. Corbeil, Jean-Claude. 2007. L’embarras des langues: Origine, conception et évolution de la politique linguistique québécoise. Montreal: Québec Amérique. Csergo, Zsuzsa. 2007. Talk of the Nation: Language and Conflict in Romania and Slovakia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. De Schutter, Helder. 2007. “Language Policy and Political Philosophy: On the Emerging Linguistic Justice Debate.” Language Problems & Language Planning 31 (1): 1–27. Deutsch, Karl W. 1953. Nationalism and Social Communication. New York: Wiley. Dobrowolsky, Alexandra, and Jane Jenson. 2004. “Shifting Representations of Citizenship: Canadian Politics of ‘Women’ and ‘Children.’” Social Politics 11 (2): 154–80. Dua, Hans R. 1994. Hegemony of English: Future of Developing Languages in the Third World. Mysore: Yashoda Publications. Esman, Milton J., ed. 1977. Ethnic Conflict in the Western World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Evans, Peter, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds. 1985. Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fishman, Joshua A., and Olefia García, eds. 2010. Language & Ethnic Identity. Vol. 1: Disciplinary & Regional Perspectives. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gazzola, Michele. 2014. The Evaluation of Language Regimes: Theory and Application to Multilingual Patent Organisations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Grin, François. 2003. Language Policy Evaluation and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Guigni, Marco. 2002. “L’approche néo-institutionnaliste en science politique.” Politique et sociétés 21 (3): 69–90. Hall, Peter, and Rosemary Taylor. 1996. “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms.” Political Studies 64: 936–57. Hamel, Rainer Enrique. 2010. “L’aménagement linguistique et la globalisation des langues du monde.” Télescope 16 (3): 1–22. Heller, Monica, and Alexandre Duchêne. 2007. “Discourses of Endangerment: Sociolinguistics, Globalization and Social Order.” In Discourses of Endangerment: Interest and Ideology in the Defense of Languages, edited by Alexandre Duchêne and Monica Heller, 1–13. London: Continuum. Huntington, Samuel. 2004. Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Inglehart, Ronald R., and Margaret Woodward. 1962. “Language Conflicts and Political Community.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 10: 27–45. Ives, Peter. 2004. Language and Hegemony in Gramsci. Halifax: Fernwood.

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– 2010. “Cosmopolitanism and Global English: Language Politics in Globalisation Debates.” Political Studies 58 (3): 516–35. Jenson, Jane. 2000. “Restructuring Citizenship Regimes: The French and Canadian Women’s Movements in the 1990s.” In Globalizing Institutions: Case Studies in Regulation and Innovation, edited by Jane Jenson and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 231–52. Aldershot: Ashgate. Jenson, Jane, and Susan D. Phillips. 1996. “Regime Shifts: New Citizenship Practices in Canada.” International Journal of Canadian Studies 14: 111–35. – 2001. “Redesigning the Canadian Citizenship Regime: Remaking Institutions of Representation.” In Citizenship, Markets, and the State, edited by Colin Crouch, Klaus Eder, and Damian Tambini, 69–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jobert, Bruno, and Pierre Muller. 1987. L’État en action: Politiques publiques et corporatismes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Keating, Michael. 1998. The New Regionalism in Western Europe: Territorial Restructuring and Political Change. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Keating, Michael, John Loughlin, and Chris Deschouwer. 2003. Culture, Institutions and Regional Development: A Study of Eight European Regions. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Kjær, Anne Lise, and Silvia Adamo, eds. 2011. Linguistic Diversity and European Democracy. Surrey: Ashgate. Kraus, Peter A. 2008. A Union of Diversity: Language, Identity and Polity-Building in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kymlicka, Will, and Alan Patten, eds. 2003. Language Rights and Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Laitin, David D. 1988. “Language Games.” Comparative Politics 20: 289–302. – 1992. Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laponce, Jean. 1984. Langue et territoire. Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval. Lecours, André. 2005. New Institutionalism: Theory and Analysis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Liu, Amy. 2009. “The Politics of Language Regimes.” p hd diss., Emory University. Loughlin, John. 2005. “Les changements de paradigmes de l’État et les politiques publiques envers les minorités linguistiques et culturelles en Europe de l’Ouest.” In La gouvernance linguistique: Le Canada en perspective, edited by Jean-Pierre Wallot, 19–38. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Macedo, Donaldo, Bessie Dendrinos, and Panayota Gouanari. 2003. The Hegemony of English. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. May, Stephen. 2001. Language and Minority Rights: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Language. London: Longman.

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– 2003. “Misconceiving Minority Languages Rights: Implications for Political Theory.” In Language Rights and Political Theory, edited by Will Kymlicka and Alan Patten, 123–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press. – 2013. “Globalization, Language(s) and Mobility.” Keynote address presented at the ces ifo Summer Institute Workshop on the Economics of Language Policy, Venice, 26–27 July. McRae, Kenneth D. 1983. Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies. Vol. 1: Switzerland. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. – 1986. Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies. Vol. 2: Belgium. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. – 1997. Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies. Vol. 3: Finland. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Mitchell, Lisa. 2010. Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Muller, Pierre. 2000. Airbus, l’ambition européenne: Logique d’État et logique de marché. Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan. Peters, Guy. 2005. The “New Institutionalism.” London: Continuum. Phillipson, Robert. 1992. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pierson. Paul. 1994. Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pogge, Thomas W. 2003. “Accommodation Rights for Hispanics in the United States.” In Language Rights and Political Theory, edited by Will Kymlicka and Alan Patten, 105–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pool, Jonathan. 1990. “Language Regimes and Political Regimes.” In Language Policy and Political Development, edited by Brian Weinstein, 241–61. Norwood, nj: Ablex. Ricento, Thomas. 2000. “Historical and Theoretical Perspectives in Language Policy and Planning.” In Ideology, Politics and Language Policies: Focus on English, edited by Thomas Ricento, 9–24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Romaine, Suzanne. Forthcoming. “Language and Sustainable Development: Integrating the Economics of Language Policy with Poverty Reduction and Biodiversity Conservation.” In The Economics of Language Policy, edited by Bengt-Arne Wickström and Michele Gazzola. Cambridge, ma : mit Press. Safran, William. 2010. “Political Science and Politics.” In Language & Ethnic Identity. Vol. 1: Disciplinary & Regional Perspectives, edited by Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García, 49–69. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schieffelin, Bambi, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, eds. 1998. Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Schiffman, Harold F. 1996. Linguistic Culture and Language Policy. London: Routledge. Schmidt, Ronald, Sr. 2000. Language Policy and Identity Politics in the United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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Schneider, Anne, and Helen Ingram. 1993. “Social Construction of Target Populations: Implications for Politics and Policy.” American Political Science Review 87 (2): 334–47. Skocpol, Theda. 1985. “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, 3–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sonntag, Selma K. 1991. Competition and Compromise amongst Elites in Belgian Language Politics. Bonn: Dümmler. – 2003. The Local Politics of Global English. Lanham, md : Lexington Books. – 2010. “La diversité linguistique et la mondialisation: Les limites des théories libérales.” Politique et sociétés 29 (1): 15–43. Sonntag, Selma K., and Jonathan Pool. 1987. “Linguistic Denial and Self-Denial: American Ideologies of Language.” Language Problems and Language Planning 11 (1): 46–65. Spolsky, Bernard. 2004. Language Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinmo, Sven. 2003. “What Is Historical Institutionalism?” In Approaches in the Social Sciences, edited by Donatella Della Porta and Michael Keating, 150–78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinmo, Sven, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth, eds. 1992. Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tannen, Deborah. 1990. You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc. Tatalovich, Raymond. 1995. Nativism Reborn? The Official Language Movement and the American States. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Tollefson, James W. 2002. “Introduction: Critical Issues in Educational Language Policy.” In Language Policies in Education: Critical Issues, edited by James W. Tollefson, 3–15. Mahwah, nj : Lawrence Erlbaum. Van Parijs, Philippe. 2011. Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weinstein, Brian. 1983. The Civic Tongue: Political Consequences of Language Choices. New York: Longman. –, ed. 1990. Language Policy and Political Development. Norwood, nj : Ablex. Williams, Colin, 2007. “Articulating the Horizons of Welsh.” In Language and Governance, edited by Colin Williams, 387–433. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Woolard, Kathryn. 1985. “Language Variation and Cultural Hegemony: Toward an Integration of Sociolinguistic and Social Theory.” American Ethnologist 12 (4): 738–48. Wright, Sue. 2004. Language Policy and Language Planning: From Nationalism to Globalisation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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PART ONE | CO N TOU R S

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1 State Tradition and Language Regime in Canada¹ LI N DA CA R D IN AL

Canada’s language regime, following the adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Charter) in 1982, has become court-driven. In this chapter, I provide an institutional and historical examination of the relationship between state traditions and the courts in the area of language policy in Canada. Since the adoption of the 1982 Charter, the impetus for state action in the area of official languages has come largely from the courts. We can identify a new governing modus operandi in which the courts, and not Parliament, increasingly drive more governmental action in the area of language planning and policy-making. Although judicial rulings have enabled the development of language rights, I argue that Canada’s language regime nevertheless remains path dependent on the Canadian state tradition of political compromise. Using an institutional and historical approach, I explore the complex relationship between state traditions and the courts in the development of Canada’s language regime. In the first section, I provide an overview of the transformations in that language regime in the context of Canada’s state traditions. In the second section, I explore the relationship between state traditions and court action since 1982. I conclude by raising the question of whether a court-driven language regime can be sustained. C A NA DA’ S S TAT E T R A D I T I O N S A N D L A N G U AGE REGIM E : A N OV E R V I E W

The close historical ties between Canada and Great Britain suggest commonalities, the most obvious being the Westminster (parliamentary)

model. However, David E. Smith (2002; 2010) insists on federalism, binationalism (English and French), religious minority rights, and language rights as more important than the Westminster model in Canada. Smith emphasizes that these characteristics make the Canadian political system distinct. For example, he insists on the interactions between federalism and the Crown in Canada that have led to the development of a specific tradition of executive federalism, distinct from the United States and Britain (see also Lagassé 2012). In keeping with Smith, I also suggest that what makes Canada unique is its tradition of political compromise. Canada was not born out of a revolution like its American neighbour. Political compromise between its founding peoples (English and French) and between its founding provinces (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Quebec) informed its approach to constitutionalism.² For instance, federalism was adopted in Canada partly to accommodate Quebec’s need to protect its specific culture and language. In a similar vein, Quebec was guaranteed a percentage of seats in the House of Commons to ensure its representation. In short, in the Canadian context, political compromise represents a specific practice of brokerage politics or elite accommodation that enables the country to evolve or transform itself incrementally. Binationalism, religious minority rights, and language rights as referred to by Smith are informed by the need for political compromise. At least until 1982, political compromise represented the guiding principle of state action in the area of language rights. The Canadian Confederation was established in 1867 in response to a series of critical events. In the 1830s, both Lower (now Quebec) and Upper (now Ontario) Canada witnessed rebellions.³ Following the defeat of these rebellions, the creation of a United Canada in 1840 led to the prohibition of the French language in the new assembly, but only temporarily. Elected officials from Lower Canada were not compliant. Finally, after more than twenty years of political turmoil, language rights figured in the new 1867 constitution (British North America Act). Section 133 of the constitution referenced language rights in Parliament and before the courts. French would be used in the Canadian and the Quebec parliaments and in the courts, along with English. A survey of constitutional debates during the negotiations leading to Confederation reveals many references to the principle of compromise in regard to language and minority rights.⁴ The legislative advance made by section 133 was not guaranteed in practice. French or English could be used in the Canadian Parliament, but it

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took 112 years before simultaneous translation was provided to elected officials (Cardinal and Normand 2013, 134). The spirit of compromise that informed section 133 was also not maintained, especially by the provinces. For example, the Orange Order and the Canada First Movement helped convince provincial legislatures to ban French (as well as Gaelic and German) from the public domain (Berger 1970; Aunger 2001). Discrimination against French speakers also became routine. French-speaking groups sought the intervention of the federal government as well as the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (jcpc ) in London at the time, but with no success (Canada’s Supreme Court was created in 1875, but appeals could be made to the jcpc until 1933 for criminal cases and 1949 for civil). In the particular cases of discrimination against French speakers, appeals to the jcpc led to the conclusion that language was the provinces’ prerogative (Vipond 1991). Because of federalism and political pressure from groups in English Canada, the Canadian government did not consider it necessary to intervene in order to protect French-speaking minorities outside of Quebec. There was one exception: in 1896, after much pressure from the Quebec government and French-speaking minorities, the Canadian government forced the Manitoba government into a compromise on language rights (Cardin, Couture, and Allaire 1996, 77–81). Better known as the Laurier-Greenway agreement, the compromise allowed instruction to take place in French in “bilingual schools” where ten or more – in urban centres, twenty-five or more – pupils were French native speakers (Canada 1897). No such agreement was ever considered with the other provinces. After World War i , following pressure from Quebec, the Canadian government provided some accommodating measures like bilingual postage stamps (1927), banknotes (1936), and bank cheques (1945) (Cardinal and Normand 2013, 135). These measures strengthened bilingualism in federal institutions. In the 1960s, the Canadian government was forced to become more interventionist following the growth of Quebec nationalism, the emergence of a strong movement for the independence of Quebec, and further pressure from French-speaking minorities in other provinces. The claim that Canada was founded on two languages, French and English, became prominent in the public domain following the creation of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (b&b Commission) in 1963. The b&b Commission called for more positive intervention by the Canadian state in the area of language. The adoption of a new language policy would promote national unity through a renewed social and

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political contract and the recognition of the equality of English and French speaking peoples’ status (McRoberts 2002; Yalden 2013; Fraser 2013). In response, the federal government adopted the 1969 Official Languages Act, which granted linguistic rights to all Canadians in their relationship with the federal government. The act was premised on an understanding that all Canadians should be given the right to be served by the federal government in the official language of their choice. The federal public service, which English speakers had always dominated, needed to become more representative of Canada’s French-speaking population while respecting the merit principle.⁵ The new legislation also created the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, which protects linguistic rights and promote official languages in Canadian society. The official language commissioner also ensures that federal institutions comply with the Official Languages Act (Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages 2012). Although a spirit of compromise informed the new legislation on language rights in Canada, the Official Languages Act remained within the federal sphere of jurisdiction. Despite the recognition of new language rights for all Canadians, the act did not directly affect provincial governments. However, because of the federal system, the provinces could also develop their own distinct language regime (Cardinal and Normand 2013). New Brunswick, for instance, made French and English its official languages, but no other predominantly English-speaking province followed its example. Ontario considered offering services in French, but only where numbers warranted or where it was considered practical or reasonable (Cardinal and Normand 2013). The Ontario government of the 1960s was quick to reject the proposition that French could be made official in the province (Cardinal and Lang 2007). Legislation that provides language rights in Ontario was adopted in 1986 and remained premised on offering language services only where practical and reasonable (Cartwright 1998). Other English-speaking provinces still have very limited language regimes. In contrast, territories have to comply with the federal language regime. Other languages can also be officially recognized in addition to English and French. For example, Nunavut has three official languages (English, French, and Inuktitut). In the Northwest Territories, English and French are official languages but Chipewyan, Cree, Gwich’in, Inuinnaqtun, Inuktitut, Inuvialuktun, North Slavey, South Slavey, and Tåîchô are also recognized. In the Yukon, English and French are the official languages, but the Official Languages Act in the Yukon also recognizes the existence of

32 | Linda Cardinal

aboriginal languages. Quebec is the only province in Canada where French is the sole official language (Cardinal 2010; Corbeil 2007).⁶ At the federal level, language rights also had certain limits. The implementation of the Official Languages Act gave Canadians the right to be served by the federal government in their official language of choice, but only where numbers warranted. For example, bilingual districts were created for the delivery of services to official language minorities but only where they represented at least 10 per cent of the population. Given the context and Canada’s past traditions in the area of language rights, it might have been politically necessary to devise such a principle in order to gain the English-speaking majority’s support. The approach, despite being informed by the spirit of compromise, remained limited in practice. Debates on language rights, Quebec’s status in the federation, and the need for a stronger defence of official language minorities continued after the adoption of the Official Languages Act and led to major developments in Canada’s language regime. Partly in an effort to respond to these persistent debates, the Charter was adopted in 1982. It entrenched the equality of the English and French languages, gave the official languages constitutional status, and guaranteed official language minorities the constitutional right to receive an education in their mother tongue. More specifically, section 23 of the Charter guarantees that “parents belonging to a linguistic minority have the right to have their children educated in the minority language, in homogeneous schools which they can manage, where numbers warrant.” The adoption of the Charter required that a new Official Languages Act be legislated to bring it in line with the constitutionally defined language rights. The Official Languages Act 1988 embraces a quasi-human rights approach that involved promoting language rights, i.e., linguistic equality, in all aspects of Canadian society (McMillan 1998). For instance, part v of the new act grants civil servants the right to work in their official language of choice. It also requires that the government actively offer its services in both official languages in areas defined as bilingual. Part vii confirms the federal government’s obligation to promote the development and vitality of its official language minorities. This new generation of language rights represents change in Canada’s language regime, away from the compromisebased regime and limited approach to language rights of the past. The treatment of language rights in the post-Charter era requires much more positive state action.

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Canada’s new language regime was not established overnight. It took more than conventional politics to bring about such change. Important changes to Canada’s language regime have been court-driven. In the next section, I briefly explore the courts’ key role in providing the impetus for the implementation of language rights in the post-1982 era. I also discuss how they dealt with the Canadian state’s tradition of compromise and federalism in the area of language rights. C A NA DA’ S L A NG U A G E R EG I ME A N D T H E CO URTS

Since the adoption of the Charter, Canadian courts, especially the Supreme Court of Canada, have been very active in the area of language rights, in effect bringing about change in Canada’s language regime through their rulings. They have provided important leadership in determining the language rights of Canadians, especially those of official language minorities (English speakers inside Quebec and French speakers outside Quebec). A review of all court rulings from 1982 to 2012 shows that almost forty have addressed a wide range of language-related issues. For instance, the courts have confirmed education rights for official language minorities, language rights of the accused, the right to public services adapted to the unique needs of official language minority communities, the right to institutions for and managed by official language minorities, and the principle of substantive equality.⁷ Even court rulings that do not directly relate to language rights have affected their interpretation. For example, in 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada recognized in its ruling in Reference re Secession in Quebec ([1998] 2 scr 217) that the protection of minorities was an unwritten principle of the Canadian constitution. The ruling was then used in other cases pertaining to language rights (see Lalonde v. Ontario [Health Services Restructuring Commission], [1999] 48 or [3d] 50, 181 dlr [4th] 263 [Ont Div Ct] and Lalonde v. Ontario [Health Services Restructuring Commission], [2001] 56 or [3d] 505, 208 dlr [4th] 577). Over the course of thirty years, the courts have gradually transformed Canada’s language regime. In ruling after ruling, they have forced federal and provincial governments to adopt policies and initiate measures favourable to official languages rights. At this point, it is important to add that since the adoption of the Charter, the Canadian government has at least partly supported this court-driven approach to the definition and in-

34 | Linda Cardinal

terpretation of language rights – an approach that has led to many debates as to whether such issues should be decided by Parliament or the courts (Morton and Knopff 2001; Woehrling 2006). Most significantly, the federal government established and funded the Court Challenges Program to provide financial support to test the constitution’s language and equality provisions.⁸ The program was initially conceived as a strategy to assist Quebec’s English-speaking minority in its fight against Quebec’s French Language Charter, which imposed some restrictions on the English language in the province (Cardinal 2000). The Court Challenges Program contributed to the courts’ increased role in transforming Canada’s language regime into one that actively promoted language rights. A body of jurisprudence favourable to official language minority communities was developed from various cases supported by the Court Challenges Program. The court-centric strategy was eventually embraced by French-speaking minority communities. Once they actively engaged this approach to claim their language rights, the results paid off handsomely. I am not able to examine at any length the gains made by French-speaking minority communities in this chapter. Suffice it to say that in the area of education, French-speaking minority communities won the right to their own school boards (Normand 2013). French-language minority education was further strengthened because of such recognition. French-speaking minorities also won important battles in other areas. In the justice sector, they were recognized as having the right to a trial in the official language of their choice. The Supreme Court recognized that the Canadian government must take the necessary measures to implement official language guarantees (Cardinal et al. 2005, 60). French-speaking minority communities also won the right to receive government services actively and not just on demand. This has been particularly important in New Brunswick, where the Supreme Court recognized that the provincial official language legislation also applies to municipal governments. In short, the Court Challenges Program has made French-speaking minorities’ claims legitimate and appropriate in the new court-driven language regime. The existence of the Court Challenges Program is, however, no guarantee that rulings on language rights will always be favourable to official language minorities. At times, even the courts have invoked the state tradition of compromise in their rulings so as to restrain language rights

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(Foucher 2008; Chouinard 2013). They have also upheld the federalism tradition by limiting language rights in favour of provincial jurisdictions (Foucher 2008). In 1986, three cases – Bilodeau, McDonald, and Société des Acadiens du Nouveau-Brunswick – led the Supreme Court to conclude that language rights in Canada needed to be viewed as a political compromise and tempered by provincial considerations. In Bilodeau v. Attorney General (Manitoba) ([1986] scr 449), the court had to determine whether a summons in the province of Manitoba needed to be bilingual. In McDonald v. City of Montreal ([1986] 1 scr 460), it had to rule on the legality of a unilingual French summons by the City of Montreal. As for Société des Acadiens v. Association of Parents ([1986] 1 scr 549), it had to decide whether French speakers in New Brunswick had the right to be heard in their official language of choice in the province’s courts. In the two first cases, the Supreme Court ruled that a summons did not need to be bilingual. In the third case, it stated that French-speaking citizens in New Brunswick did not have the right to be heard or understood by the courts in their official language; the argument was that “the courts should approach language rights with restraint” (Société des Acadiens v. Association of Parents, [1986] 1 scr 549, paras. 64–5). The ruling led to intense activity among the French-speaking population in New Brunswick, which prompted the reinforcement of the provincial language regime. In each of the three rulings, the Supreme Court described language rights as a political compromise. For Foucher (2008b, 271), whether the rulings referred to the 1867 Constitution or the 1982 Charter, characterizing language rights as a compromise limited their scope (see also Réaume 2002). In contrast, in 1990, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Mahé v. Alberta ([1990] 1 scr 342) demonstrated a positive interpretation of language rights. Invoking the need to interpret language rights in a liberal and generous manner, the court ruled that French-speaking minorities in Alberta had the right to the ownership and management of their own schools, where numbers warrant. Building on the Mahé ruling, in 1999 the court reaffirmed in Beaulac that the tradition of political compromise had to be discarded in favour of more expansive interpretations of language rights. It declared that political compromise should no longer be a factor in determining whether Canadians had the right to be understood by judges in their official language of choice (a marked departure from the ruling in Société des Acadiens). With these rulings, the Supreme Court finally recog-

36 | Linda Cardinal

nized that language rights are positive rights, not negative rights, and that they have to be interpreted with the objective of equality in mind. Such interpretations would require more state action for their implementation (R. v. Beaulac, [1999] 1 rcs 768, para. 20). Following Beaulac, the Supreme Court ruled in Arsenault-Cameron v. Prince Edward Island ([2000] 1 scr ) and then in DesRochers v. Canada (Industry) ([2009] 1 scr 194) that the federal government needed to consult official language minorities in order to tailor its programmes to their unique needs. Arsenault-Cameron and Beaulac expanded the principle of equality first referenced in Beaulac. In these rulings, linguistic equality is defined in substantive terms. For many, the Supreme Court thus paved the way for the definition of language rights as collective rights (Foucher 2008; Chouinard 2013; Power and Foucher 2004). These more recent groundbreaking judgements contributed to the transformation from an approach to language rights rooted in the state tradition of compromise to a more substantive approach informed by the principle of linguistic equality. Nevertheless, despite the Supreme Court’s recognition of language rights as positive rights, the principle that they should be applied where numbers warrant, even in the area of education, has remained unchallenged. The Quebec government does not use the where-numbers-warrant principle in the area of education, though it does apply the approach in other domains.⁹ It is worth noting that since 2003, when Canada’s first Official Languages Plan was published, Canadian and some provincial governments have become more active in the area of language (Canada 2003). The first language plan was the result of pressure from the commissioner of official languages, members of Parliament, and official language minority communities to rectify the government’s lack of action on the issue of official languages, a casualty of the country’s economic difficulties in the 1990s (Cardinal 2007). What is interesting is that at the time there was no crisis of national unity or separatist threats from Quebec. The plan was published to put official languages back on the national agenda. It was the first document to propose a global approach to the promotion of official languages rights in all areas of Canadian society. In particular, it emphasized the importance of promoting and enhancing the development and vitality of official language minority communities. When the 2003 plan expired after five years, a new plan was introduced in 2008 to remain in effect

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until 2013 (Canada 2008). A third plan for official languages was released in 2013. The 2008 and 2013 plans framed official languages through the lens of their economic value (Cardinal and Gaspard 2013; Forgues 2013). This economic focus is a function of the Conservative Party coming to power in 2006. The party has encouraged the transformation of Canadian society in a variety of ways (see Flanagan 2007; 1995). Conservative activists have called for reduced state intervention in all sectors of life, including official languages. In keeping with the Conservative program, state action has been more and more subordinated to a neo-liberal and socially conservative agenda. This new approach has had important consequences for the promotion of language rights in Canada (Cardinal 2012). The message conveyed to Canadians is that official languages are no longer a core dimension of Canadian identity. There is also cause for concern at the provincial level, as some provinces remain unresponsive to their official language minority needs. For example, French-speaking minority communities across the country rely on funding from provincial governments in the area of education, even though their right to education in their official language is guaranteed by section 23 of the Charter. At the time of writing, French-speaking parents in British Columbia have taken the provincial government to court in order to compel it to fund new elementary schools for French-speaking pupils in the city of Vancouver. French speakers have also taken that same government to court over access to French-language employment services. Although the federal government devolved employment services to the province, the province argues that it does not have an obligation to actively offer what were once federal services in both official languages. Services are offered in French on demand only. For Foucher (2008b, 504), the devolution of public services from the federal government to the provinces calls for more harmonization between the federal and provincial language regimes. It is cause for concern with regard to the federal government’s fiduciary role toward official language minorities. This role was confirmed through an amendment to part vii of the Official Languages Act in 2005 that required the state to take positive measures to promote the development and vitality of official languages across the country and of official language minority communities. However, the 2005 amendment states that those positive measures need to be compatible with the federal system. In other words, positive measures need to respect provincial jurisdictions.

38 | Linda Cardinal

C ON C LUS I ON

Language rights in Canada have been court-driven since the adoption of the Charter. Some argue that court-driven rights in Canada, including language rights, have transformed parliamentarianism and pose a threat to the Westminster model (Ajzenstat 1997; Knopff 1998; Bateman 1998). Rights, including language rights, are, however, part of Canada’s political culture and state traditions (Vipond 1992). In this chapter, I have argued that court-led action in the area of language is a product of Canada’s state traditions of political compromise and federalism as well as a harbinger of changes in that state tradition as a result of the Charter. By exploring the complex relationship between the state tradition of political compromise and the courts, I have proposed an institutional and historical lens through which to explain the development of Canada’s language regime. Compromise and federalism both enhanced and constrained the application of language rights in Canada. Court rulings on language rights need to be contextualized in terms of state traditions. It is undeniable that the courts have compelled hesitant governments to act in the area of language rights, but they have also had to take into account state, particularly provincial, traditions in their rulings. My analysis assumes that transformations in language practices in Canada have occurred at critical moments followed by periods of incremental change, due in large part to court rulings. However, the state and its institutions, including the courts, are not immune from changes in society. Political and social events have focused attention on language in Canada at various tense moments in the country’s history. At these times, court rulings took on significant symbolic importance beyond their practical and legal implications. The Supreme Court of Canada has defined language equality as a new guiding principle for state action. It is not yet clear if the state will maintain a substantive interpretation of language equality as the courts suggest. The new policy of supporting official languages for their added economic value may not be conducive to the courts’ interpretation of language rights rooted in substantive equality. Under the economic model, the French-speaking minority is disadvantaged by being forced into direct competition with the English-speaking majority. At the time of writing, there is no language crisis in Canada. Language is not (openly) the controversial topic it was in the 1980s or 1990s,

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although Canada may be at a new critical juncture. Commentators agree that the consensus on language remains fragile (McMillan 2003; Cardinal 2012; Charbonneau 2012).¹⁰ While a significant portion of the Canadian population declare themselves favourable to official languages (MacMillan 2013), less than 20 per cent are truly bilingual. As witnessed in the 2013 official languages plan, the economic value of official languages in Canada has become the key benchmark for discussing the value of supporting French-speaking minority communities. In the end, despite the important advances it has made for language rights, the court-driven language regime may eventually be thought to lack political legitimacy. New sources, beyond the courts, may be required to legitimize language rights and promote official languages in Canada. Whether governments will be willing to move ahead with this type of agenda is not clear. Debates about the role of state traditions and the courts in the area of language rights are unlikely to disappear.

NOTES

1 I would like to thank Mark Abley, Helaina Gaspard, and Selma K. Sonntag for their comments and suggestions of revisions for this chapter. 2 The concept of “founding people” is limited to English and French in the chapter for obvious historical reasons. At the time, First Peoples in Canada were not considered a founding people, although today multinational Canada arguably comprises First Nations, French Canada, and English Canada. 3 For details on those events, see Harvey (2005). 4 See Province of Canada (1865). 5 See Helaina Gaspard’s chapter 10 in this volume for more details on the implementation of the Official Languages Act in the federal public service. 6 For overviews of each language regimes in the Canadian provinces and territories, see the two following websites: Site for Language Management in Canada (www.slmc.uottawa.ca) and L’aménagement linguistique dans le monde (www.axl.cefan.ulaval.ca). 7 Each ruling is discussed in Language Rights (Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages 2012). 8 In 2008, the Court Challenges Program was replaced by the Language Rights Support Program. It no longer takes on cases addressing equality rights issues, only language rights. 9 The specificities of Quebec’s language regime and relationship to the courts would need an article on its own. I do not address those specificities in this chapter. See Cardinal (2010).

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10 Among issues that remain important, reports from the Official Language Commissioner continue to criticize lack of implementation of official languages in the public service. Ottawa, Canada’s capital, is still not officially bilingual even though the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in Canada made the recommendation to modify its status in 1960s.

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Ajzenstat, Janet. 1997. “Reconciling Parliament and Rights: A.V. Dicey Reads the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 30 (4): 645–62. Aunger, Edmund. 2001. “Justifying the End of Official Bilingualism: Canada’s North-West Assembly and the Dual-Language Question, 1889–1892.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 34 (3): 451–86. Bateman, Thomas J. 1998. “Rights Application Doctrine and the Clash of Constitutionalisms in Canada.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 31 (1): 3–29. Berger, Carl. 1970. The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Canada. 1897. Laurier-Greenway Compromise. No. 35, 1–2. Accessed 6 February 2014. http://www.slmc.uottawa.ca/?q=leg_laurier-greenway_compromise. – 2003. The Next Act: New Momentum for Canada’s Linguistic Duality Action Plan for Official Languages. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer. – 2008. Roadmap for Canada’s Linguistic Duality: Acting for the Future 2008–2013. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer. – 2013. Education, Immigration, Communities: Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013–2018. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer. – 1982. Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Part i of the Constitution Act, being Schedule b to the Canada Act 1982 (uk ), 1982, c 11. Accessed 6 February 2014. http://laws.lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const/Const_index.html. Cardin, Jean-François, Claude Couture, and Gratien Allaire. 1996. Histoire du Canada: Espace et différences. Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval. Cardinal, Linda. 2000. “Le pouvoir exécutif et la judiciarisation de la politique au Canada: Une étude du Programme de contestation judiciaire.” Politique et sociétés 20 (1): 43–65. – 2010. “Language Policy-Making and Planning in Québec and in Canada.” In Quebec Questions: Quebec Studies for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Stéphan Gervais, Christopher Kirkey, and Jarrett Rudy, 186–203. Oxford: Oxford University Press. – 2012. “Que restera-t-il du projet linguistique canadien en 2015?” In L’état du Québec 2012, edited by L’Institut du Nouveau Monde, 460–2. Montreal: Boréal. Cardinal, Linda, and Helaina Gaspard. 2013. “The Harper Language Regime and Official Language Minorities in Canada.” Paper presented at the annual meeting

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of the Canadian Association of Political Science, University of Victoria, British Columbia, 6 June. Cardinal, Linda, and Stéphane Lang. 2007. “Les Franco-Ontariens et la pensée constitutionnelle de Roy McMurtry.” Mens: Revue d’histoire intellectuelle de l’Amérique française 7 (2): 279–311. Cardinal, Linda, Stéphane Lang, Nathalie Plante, Anik Sauvé, and Chantal Terrien. 2005. Les services en français dans le domaine de la justice en Ontario: Un état des lieux. Ottawa: Chaire de recherche sur la francophonie et les politiques publiques. Cardinal, Linda, and Martin Normand. 2013. “Distinct Accents: The Language Regimes of Ontario and Quebec.” In Quebec-Ontario Relations, edited by JeanFrançois Savard, Louis Côté, and Alexandre Brassard, 131–58. Quebec: Presses de l’Université du Québec. Cartwright, Don. 1998. “French-Language Services in Ontario: A Policy of ‘Overly Prudent Gradualism’?” In Language and Politics in the United States and Canada: Myths and Realities, edited by Thomas Ricento and Barbara Burnaby, 273–99. Mahwah, nj : L. Erlbaum. Charbonneau, François. 2012. “Comprendre le nouveau nationalisme canadien: Le Canada comme idéal moral politique.” In Introduction aux études canadiennes, edited by Geoffroy Ewen and Colin M. Coates, 78–91. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Chouinard, Stéphanie. 2013. “The Rise of Non-territorial Autonomy in Canada: Towards a Doctrine of Institutional Completeness in the Domain of Minority Language Rights.” Ethnopolitics. doi:10.1080/17449057.2013.794495. Corbeil, Jean-Claude. 2007. L’embarras des langues: Origine, conception et évolution de la politique linguistique québécoise. Montreal: Québec Amérique. Doucet, Michel. 2011. “La Cour suprême du Canada et le principe de la progression vers l’égalité des droits linguistiques: Un dialogue inachevé?” In À l’avant-garde de la dualité: Mélanges en l’honneur de Michel Bastarache, edited by Nicolas C.G. Lambert, 281–322. Cowansville: Éditions Yvon Blais. Flanagan, Thomas. 1995. Waiting for the Wave: The Reform Party and Preston Manning. Toronto: Stoddart. – 2007. Harper’s Team: Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Forgues, Éric. 2013. “La Feuille de route pour les langues officielles 2013–2018.” Les savoirs de la gouvernance communautaire 5 (1): 8–11. Foucher, Pierre. 2008. “Droits et lois linguistiques: Le droit au service du Canada français.” In L’espace francophone en milieu minoritaire au Canada: Nouveaux enjeux, nouvelles mobilisations, edited by Joseph Yvon Thériault, Anne Gilbert, and Linda Cardinal, 463–513. Montreal: Fides. Fraser, Graham. 2013. “The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 50 Years Later.” Canadian Issues/Thèmes canadiens (Fall): 14–18. Knopff, Rainer. 1998. “Populism and the Politics of Rights: The Dual Attack on Representative Democracy.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 31 (4): 683–705.

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Lagassé, Philippe. 2012. “Parliamentary and Judicial Ambivalence toward Executive Prerogative Powers in Canada.” Public Administration in Canada 55 (2): 157–80. MacMillan, C. Michael. 1998. The Practice of Language Rights in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 2003. “Federal Language Policy in Canada and the Quebec Challenge.” In Linguistic Conflict and Language Laws, edited by Pierre Larrivée, 87–118. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. – 2013. “Resolving the Language Question: The Impact of the Bi & Bi Commission.” Canadian Issues/Thèmes canadiens (Fall): 39–43. McRoberts, Kenneth. 2002. “Les politiques de la langue au Canada: un combat contre la territorialisation.” In La politique de Babel, du monolinguisme d’Etat au plurilinguisme des peuples, edited by Denis Lacorne and Tony Judt, 155–90. Paris: Karthala. Morton, F.L., and R. Knopff. 2000. The Charter Revolution and the Court Party. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Normand, Martin. 2013. “De l’arène politique à l’arène juridique: Les communautés francophones minoritaires au Canada et la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés.” In Le nouvel ordre constitutionnel canadien: Du rapatriement de 1982 à nos jours, edited by François Rocher and Benoît Pelletier, 179–203. Montreal: Presses de l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages. 2012. Language Rights. Accessed 6 February 2014. http://www.ocol-clo.gc.ca. Power, Mark, and Pierre Foucher. 2004. “Les droits linguistiques en matière scolaire.” In Les droits linguistiques au Canada, edited by Michel Bastarache, 399– 493. Cowansville: Éditions Yvon Blais. Province of Canada. 1865. Parliamentary Debates on the Subject of the Confederation of the British North America American Provinces, 3rd session, 8th Provincial Parliament of Canada. Quebec: Hunter, Rose & Co. Réaume, Denise G. 2002. “The Demise of the Political Compromise Doctrine: Have Official Languages Rights been Revived?” McGill Law Journal 47: 593–624. Smith, David E. 2002. “The Westminster Model in Ottawa: A Study in the Absence of Influence.” British Journal of Canadian Studies 15 (1–2): 54–64. – 2010. Federalism and the Constitution of Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Vipond, Robert. 1991. Liberty and Community and the Failure of the Canadian Constitution. New York: State University of New York Press. Woehrling, José. 2006. “Les conséquences de l’application de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés pour la vie politique et démocratique et l’équilibre du système fédéral.” In Le fédéralisme canadien, edited by Alain-G. Gagnon, 251–86. Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal. Yalden, Maxwell. 2013. “Foreword: The b&b Commission – 50 Years On.” Canadian Issues/Thèmes canadiens (Fall): 8–14.

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2 State Tradition and Language Regime in the United States: Time for Change?¹ S E LMA K . S O NNTAG

The United States presents an interesting case for the study of state tradition and language regime. Its liberal foundations informing its political and economic ideology and institutions, its robust federalism rooted in its geographical expanse, and its world-power status, especially since World War ii , are state traditions that, in combination, have underpinned its claim of exceptionalism. While language issues have not been as salient in the United States as elsewhere (Sonntag 1997), the country’s unusual combination of state traditions has had a determining effect on its language regime. The result has been an ad hoc, contradictory, and incoherent language regime that trends toward linguistic assimilation and homogeneity, bifurcated between domestic language policies and foreign or internationally oriented language policies. Nevertheless, a recent, innovative policy development, called “state language roadmaps,” portends to overcome aspects of the bifurcated US language regime while remaining guided and framed by state traditions. Given that this new policy initiative emanates from the international side of the bifurcated US language regime, in this chapter I focus primarily on foreign-language policy choices after briefly introducing the domestic side of the bifurcation. S TAT E T R A DI T I ON S A N D D O MEST I C L A N G U AGE POLICY CHOICE S

To begin with defining a language regime as “the set of rules that delineate which language can be used when and where” (Liu 2009, 24) before exploring facets of a more robust concept of language regime that encompasses not only practices but also conceptions of language and language

use (see the introduction of this volume, 3–28), what is exceptional about the US case is that there have been very few formal rules. Heinz Kloss (1977) some years ago characterized language policy in the United States as ad hoc and tolerance-based. Kloss’s characterization reveals more than a lack of a coherent set of formal rules. Liberal tolerance of individual choice also grates against having institutionalized rules. In this American context, minority language demands do not resonate with the liberal individualist conception of language. Those that have resonated have been, for the most part, confined to polyethnic immigrant groups (Kymlicka 1995) seeking to maintain their “heritage languages” in the private sphere. This US history of immigration and relative absence of historical national minorities, along with a decentralized, laissez-faire, liberal state, produced a regime of de facto linguistic assimilation. There are no formal, legal language rights in the United States, despite its liberal rights-based tradition. At best, language rights are derivable from civil rights legislation that prohibits discrimination on the basis of national origin (Teitelbaum and Hiller 1977). Nevertheless, the liberal, laissez-faire approach in the United States has yielded a concentration of linguistic power. Linguistic hegemony is an apt descriptor of the US assimilationist language regime (Schmidt 2009). The dominant language ideology in the country has privileged English, although this has never been enshrined in the US Constitution through an official language clause.² Linda Cardinal (2011) notes that language regimes not only reflect dominant language ideologies but also derive from political, institutional, and administrative decisions that may very well be made independent of any linguistic considerations. In the United States, instances of explicit legislation regarding language use, such as the 1968 Bilingual Education Act providing for some instruction in languages other than English in primary schools and the 1975 amendments to the Voting Rights Act stipulating multilingual ballots in certain districts, were based on poverty and illiteracy criteria rather than language considerations (Schneider 1976; Secada 1990; Voting Rights Act 1975).³ These language policies were not so much the result of linguistic minority demands as they were the result of lawmakers’ political bargaining and deal-making in the broader context of the civil rights movement and President Johnson’s War on Poverty (Gutierrez 1987, 192–5). Their enactment reflected the nationalization of social policy, including education policy that had previously been the sole purview of each of the fifty states of the American union, precipitated by the civil

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rights movement. In the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, the new policy pathway of intervention in education by the federal government allowed the Bilingual Education Act to pertain to the whole country (Crawford 2000, 89). Similarly, federal intervention in the Jim Crow South through the 1965 Voting Rights Act paved the way for amendments ten years later for federally mandated multilingual balloting, even though voting practices were the responsibility of state-level governments. A backlash to this emergent, national language regime of the 1960s and ’70s took the form of the English-Only movement in the 1980s and ’90s. The backlash has been deeply political, evoking the politics of fear regarding immigrants and insecurity in an increasingly globalized world (Cohen 2001). Most of its political battles, such as repealing bilingual education and officializing English, have been fought at the state rather than federal level, drawing state legislators and referenda into the fray (Tatalovich 1995).⁴ Hence state-federal relations informing language policy, having shifted toward the national level in the Civil Rights and Great Society era, began to shift back to the state level during Ronald Reagan’s administration. The American tradition of federalism has clearly guided language policy choice in the United States, although not always along the same pathway. C R I T I C A L J UNCT U R ES I N FO R EI G N - L A N G U A GE POLICY

State traditions of liberalism and federalism in the context of the United States’ historical development provide the contours of one side – the domestic side – of a bifurcated language regime in the country. The United States’ post-World War ii status as a superpower in the global arena has generated a reactive language policy to what are deemed foreign-language crises that stem from national security concerns and global economic competition. The goals of national security and economic competitiveness that underlie US foreign-language policy are for the most part disconnected from the assimilationist thrust of US domestic language policy. This bifurcation amplifies the contradictory and incoherent nature of the US language regime. Furthermore, even though US foreign policy has a tradition of being less politicized than domestic policy, thus leading one to perhaps expect a more coherent foreign language policy, this has not been the case. Language policy pathways on the international side have shifted

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at critical junctures, similar to shifts generated by the civil rights movement and the Reagan administration on the domestic side. The United States reacted to its “Sputnik moment” with an embryonic language policy suited for its new superpower status. The National Defense Education Act (ndea ), passed in 1958, was intended “to strengthen the national defense and encourage and assist in the expansion and improvement of educational programs to meet critical national needs” (ndea 1958, 1,580). The critical national needs were deemed to be “cadres of scientists, technicians, and foreign language experts if [the United States] was to win the Cold War” (Sonntag 1990, 154). Despite its coherence of purpose, the foreign-language component of the ndea was a “failure of … language legislation” precisely because of the liberal, laissez-faire foundation of the US economic ideology and institutional context: there was no market demand for foreign language experts as there was for scientists and engineers, and it was outside of state tradition for the US government to create a demand (Sonntag 1990, 153). Twenty years later, a different international context prompted another government initiative to increase the number of polyglot Americans. The 1970s heralded the decline of the United States’ post-World War ii economic dominance. In 1978–79, President Carter set up a Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies. Its task was to make policy recommendations to bolster the United States’ economic competitive edge in world markets. This was the “Toyota moment”: as Edwards et al. (2008/09) put it, Japanese economic competition was “the Sputnik of the eighties.” However, like the 1958 ndea in response to Sputnik, policy initiatives emanating from the commission were thwarted by the liberal laissez-faire tradition in the United States: “the U.S. government [was] reluctant to regulate the private sector in regard to … language issues” (Sonntag 2003, 27). In sum, the US federal government has national security and global economic interests in reversing the monolingualism of its citizenry, yet the American tradition of a liberal economic ideology has hampered success. In addition to a laissez-faire tradition that circumscribes intervention in the private economic sphere, institutional politics and practices have contributed to the ad hoc nature of the international side of the bifurcated US language regime. There is no central authority or institution to command different federal agencies and departments to adhere to a language

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regime: Edwards (2010) blames the lack of coherency in the US “national language policy” on the non-existence of “communication and collaboration within and between agencies” responsible for the foreign-language component of the policy. Carter’s commission was an executive initiative; the 1958 ndea was a congressional act. Carter’s initiative was to entrust a commission, normally a dead end for policies. More promisingly, the administration of the ndea legislation was entrusted to the Office of Education. However, traditionally in the United States, educational issues and policies are the purview of state and local, not federal, authorities. Education did not become a federal cabinet-level department until 1980 under the Carter administration. That same year, the ndea was incorporated into the Higher Education Act under Title vi along with the Office (now Department) of Education’s Fulbright-Hays program. The latter is distinct from its better-known cousin, the Fulbright program, which is and always has been administered by the Department of State. The new Department of Education’s Title vi entailed federal grants to universities to set up national foreign language resource centres, as well as centres for international business education recommended by Carter’s commission (Edwards et al. 2008/09). This flurry of activity in the last years of his administration, while positive, was dispersed between different government entities (a federal commission, Departments of Education and State, and different programs). The Department of Education, the primary federal government agency responsible for US language policy, at least up until the 1990s, has been a particularly politically sensitive institution and continues to be a popular target for elimination among many Republicans. In the end, Carter lost re-election at least partly because of international political and economic debacles. The lack of a coherent foreign-language policy was painfully apparent when it was acknowledged that very few of the American staff at the US Embassy in Tehran knew any Farsi at the time of the Iranian Revolution (Sick 1986, 77). Operation Desert Storm, launched by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 in Iraq, next door to Carter’s debacle in Iran, produced a similar wake-up call to the inadequacies of the international side of the US language regime. In reaction, the US Congress passed the National Security Education Act (nsea ). The nsea is administered through the National Security Education Program (nsep ) under the Department of Defense (d od ). Entrusting the d od rather than the Department of Education with foreign-language policy was a significant enough change for a report com-

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missioned by Congress to bluntly state: “The responsibility for administering the nsea is assigned to d od , not the U.S. Department of Education” (Riddle 1992, 3). On the one hand, this switch to the d od was rife with political implications. On the other hand, it added yet another federal department and program to those already existing in the Departments of Education and State. In attempting to justify this further institutional dispersal of responsibility for foreign-language policy, the commissioned report claimed that the goal was to “complement, not duplicate” other efforts such as the Title vi program (Riddle 1992, 2). Department turf battles, well known in American institutional politics, were most likely part of the equation as well. President George W. Bush’s administration in the aftermath of 9/11 attempted to bring some coordination among the different foreign-language programs in the different cabinet-level departments (as well as inject more funds into the programs) through its National Security Language Initiative. The d od ’s nsep remained “a focal point” of the initiative (Slater 2006), which suggests that the turf battles, at least in regard to language policy for national security purposes, were not fully resolved. In informal conversations with their advisory group, nsep administrators suggested that the Department of Education was not doing an adequate job.⁵ Even more to the point was an op-ed piece in an nsep newsletter: the executive director of the National Council for Languages and International Studies claimed, “unfortunately ed [Department of Education] does not value foreign language education as highly as other agencies do” (Edwards 2010). Further evidence can be gleaned from the 2011 budget battles in the US Congress: the Department of Education’s ndea /Title vi was gutted, while the d od ’s nsep remained solid. The nsea also sparked a searing political debate. Over the years, but especially after the ndea was absorbed into Title vi of the Higher Education Act under the Department of Education during the Carter administration, a significant constituency among academics and educators in support of the international side of the US language regime was built. However, the dod’s usurpation of the foreign-language regime undermined that support. While both sides of the political aisle in Congress may support d od “soft power” programs such as nsep more readily than programs in the politically sensitive Department of Education, the opposite is more characteristic of those in higher education. Liberal academics found it offensive and troubling that the d od would, in effect, be funding students and

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universities to become proficient in foreign languages: it portends of an increasingly militarized social and educational agenda, consistent with global hegemony emanating from the United States’ world-power status and based on a conception of learning foreign languages solely for the sake of enhancing US hegemony. The Association of Concerned African Scholars, an academic professional organization, took a lead role in denouncing and boycotting nsep . Its concerns have been periodically reinforced: in 2003 in hearings on a congressional bill proposing greater oversight of Title vi , one “expert” propounded his theory that Title vi centres had become hotbeds of anti-Americanism, teaching subversive texts such as Edward Said’s Imperialism (h -Asia 2003). The expert continued: We know that transmissions from the September 11 highjackers [sic] went untranslated for want of Arabic speakers in our intelligence agencies. Given that, and given the ongoing lack of foreign language expertise in our defense and intelligence agencies, the directors of the Title vi African studies centers who voted unanimously, just after September 11, to reaffirm their boycott of the nsep , have all acted to undermine America’s national security, and its foreign policy. And so has every other Title vi -funded scholar in Latin American-, African-, and Middle Eastern Studies who has upheld the long-standing boycott of the nsep . (h -Asia 2003)

nsep administrators were acutely aware of this reception for their program in what had been a bastion of support for a US foreign-language regime. Early on, they enlisted an advisory group for nsep , the purpose of which was “to provide broad representation from the higher education community – it [was], in fact, [nsep ’s] formal link to higher education” (Slater 2006). It was an attempt by nsep to co-opt the higher-education community. According to nsep ’s former director, “during the period from 1994 to 2000 the Advisory Group’s input to the program leadership was invaluable particularly in areas related to structuring difficult relationships with a somewhat suspicious higher education community. Since 2000 the role of the Advisory Group has transformed into a more routine but still very important source of advice and counsel on key issues involving nsep ” (Slater 2009). By 2009, nsep administrators deemed that the advisory group had served its function and suspended it.⁶

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Perhaps more critical than winning over academicians, nsep has sought to broaden its support basis among the public through a number of initiatives. No longer confining itself to providing funds to individual undergraduate and graduate students, nsep has expanded to k –12 immersion programs, a heritage language program, and a National Language Service Corps that enlists non-English-language speakers in the United States to “use your language skills to make a difference in your state, your nation, your world” (www.nlscorps.org). nsep ’s star program, the Language Flagship, defines itself as “lead[ing] the nation in designing, supporting, and implementing a new paradigm for advanced language education” and “creating global professionals,” as branded in the program’s Discourse newsletter (www.thelanguageflagship.org). These initiatives appear to signal a shift in how language choice and use are conceived, potentially allowing for strategic language policy choices effecting language regime change. Most innovative has been the state language roadmaps initiative in terms of bringing on board community stakeholders at the state level and overcoming the international-domestic bifurcation of the US language regime. S TAT E L A N GUA G E R O A D MA P S

An unanticipated and originally unintended outcome of nsep has been state language roadmaps in Oregon, Ohio, and Texas. These are plans for language policy at the state-level of the US federal system. On the one hand, these roadmaps have the potential to overcome the bifurcation between the domestic and international dimensions of the US language regime. The state language roadmaps link federal (i.e., national-level) actors who are normally preoccupied with only the international or foreign-language side of language policy with state constituents who, most commonly, are the targets of domestic language policy. Furthermore, state language roadmaps have the potential to resolve the contradiction between a domestic assimilationist language policy geared toward making Americans monolingual and an international policy geared toward ensuring that the United States has polyglot citizens to help fulfil its global role. On the other hand, state language roadmaps reinforce institutionally and ideologically state traditions of federalism and a laissez-faire market economy. They do so by cultivating support from business and local concerns. This potentially shifts the focus away from the United States’ role as a global power and its

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quasi-militarized, d od -dependent language policy back toward language policy choices embedded in state traditions of liberalism and federalism. I elaborate on these claims below by focusing on Oregon, the first state in which a language roadmap was developed. In 2007, flush with congressional appropriations to bolster the d od ’s administration of the international dimension of the US language regime, nsep ’s Language Flagship program had unspent dollars. nsep administrators came up with the idea to sponsor “language summits” in a few states where the Language Flagship program was well established in state universities. Oregon was the first state in which nsep hosted a language summit, followed by Ohio and Texas, in the summer of 2007. The language summits would mark a partnership between the federal and state governments and bring in the “demand side” of foreign language needs by inviting state- and local-level public and private concerns to participate.⁷ Furthermore, the summits would launch development of state language roadmaps, that is, state strategic planning on language needs. Although initiated by nsep (and hence the d od ), the federal-level Departments of Labor and Commerce, but not the Department of Education, were brought in as co-sponsors. The implication was that business and labour in the public and private sectors, rather than academics in higher education, would be the stakeholders. As noted in the Language Flagship newsletter, the development of the state language roadmaps was “conducted to address growing language and cultural deficiencies in regional, state and local U.S. workforces” (“Flagship Centers” 2008, 1). In Oregon, there were some obvious business stakeholders to invite to the language summit and to include in developing the roadmap. Perhaps foremost among these were Nike and Columbia Sportswear, international retailers both headquartered in Oregon.⁸ In addition to these and other big multinational corporations (such as Intel in the technology sector), small and medium enterprises (sme s) – some involved in exporting and others focused on the domestic market – were invited to participate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the language needs of domestic-oriented sme s were for Spanish, while those of sme s involved in exporting were for Chinese (Beisembayeva et al. 2007, 8). As the final report of the Oregon state language roadmap noted, “Some of [the sme s] have a strong need to serve local immigrant populations while others wish to expand into overseas markets” (Center for Applied Second Language Studies et al. n.d., 2). An example of the former was a Coca-Cola bottler/distributor that had a 15

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per cent increase in sales when it hired a Spanish-speaking distributor/ salesperson (Crocker 2010). The bigger multinational corporations had more varied language needs, but like the export-oriented sme s they were predominantly for Asian languages. In short, the data gathered in Oregon from businesses on language needs “reveal[ed] a remarkable difference between domestic and international operations” (Beisembayeva et al. 2007, 2). While highlighting the bifurcation of the linguistic characteristics of the two markets (Spanish for domestic and Asian languages for international), this difference does not necessarily reinforce the bifurcation of past policy: the Oregon state language roadmap acknowledges, at least implicitly, the detrimental effect of the assimilationist thrust of domestic language policy in the United States on the linguistic dimension of both domestic and international business operations, some of which presumably cater to both markets. According to the final report (Centre for Applied Second Language Studies et al. n.d., 4), both the “demand from Oregon’s globally oriented businesses” and also the “demand from domestically oriented employers” are the “drivers” of the Oregon Roadmap to Language Excellence. As further indication of attempts to overcome the regime bifurcation in the Oregon case, the institutional backers at the University of Oregon, responsible for hosting the language summit and developing the language roadmap, were not only the Language Flagship program but also the Center for Applied Second Language Studies. “Second language” in the US context refers to the domestic side of the language regime, while the Language Flagship program is focused on the foreign-language side. In the Oregon case, the two sides collaborated with the domestic-side partner taking the lead, at least in terms of authorship of the roadmap report (see Center for Applied Second Language Studies et al. n.d.). These facets of the Oregon language roadmap process move toward resolving the contradiction between an assimilationist domestic language policy and the US government’s need for multilingual citizens by attempting to alter the domestic side and align it more closely with the needs of the international side of the bifurcated US language regime. Rhetorical support for this alteration on the domestic side was evident in the final report of the Oregon language roadmap: while “every Oregonian must have a professional level of English to participate fully in the economic and social life of the state,” no longer should the policy be, as it was “throughout America’s history,” to have “children of immigrants grow up to be fluent speakers of English while leaving behind their ancestral languages.” Instead, “for

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those who speak another language at home, building on and valuing their special linguistic abilities with programs to ensure literacy will allow them to become full-fledged members of American society while contributing their special gift to their country. Maintaining a home language is not an impediment to learning English, it is an asset” (Center for Applied Second Language Studies et al. n.d., 3). This conception of language as a resource has been critiqued by some sociolinguists for requiring “hl -cl [Heritage Language-Community Language] speakers to serve state agendas” (Wiley 2007, 184), rather than valuing linguistic diversity in and of itself. In Oregon, the state agenda was configured as competitiveness in the global marketplace driven by the private sector rather than the original nsep national security agenda. The debate was no longer framed by the United States’s global power agenda but by a liberal, laissez-faire market perspective that resonated with local business. In Oregon, enlisting the support of business was critical, as that was where the demand for a workforce with foreign language skills would come from. Hence nsep identified the business sector as possible “adopters,” defined as those most likely to support and adopt a strategic language plan.⁹ Initially Oregon businesses did not seem too interested in participating in the language summit and roadmap development process. However, “as they realized … their bottom line and capacity to compete was at stake,” they became “the most vocal” adopters (Crocker 2011). Plenty of rhetoric at the summit and in the roadmap process extolled the virtues of the private sector in order to entice business. Further reinforcing the liberal ideological tradition of the free market was the view that “local communities and businesses acting in their own interests” would create a market for employees proficient in foreign languages; the roadmap process would “assign value” to language proficiency (Center for Applied Second Language Studies et al. n.d., 1). While reinforcing the ideology of a free market economy, at least rhetorically, there would also be institutional changes in the form of incentives legislated by the Oregon state government. In other words, government enticement would help create a market in which foreign language proficiency had value. Among these incentives were scholarships for students demonstrating foreign language proficiency: “By giving financial and educational rewards to those [including heritage language speakers] attaining functional proficiency, Oregon will assign real value to proficiency,

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allowing market forces to encourage the development of internationally literate students from a range of backgrounds and interests” (Centre for Applied Second Language Studies et al. n.d., 3). This partnership between the state and business would underlie the success of the Oregon state language roadmap. Other incentives would include grants to school districts in conjunction with state universities to set up k –16 immersion programs, financial incentives for language teachers, and language education bonds. The latter would presumably function as other education bonds frequently issued by school districts for expenditures such as improvement of facilities. In this case, the bonds would be tied to “proficiency outcomes, allowing for market forces to work for improved levels of functionally proficient speakers”; potential buyers would be “private citizens, non-profits, or businesses” (Center for Applied Second Language Studies et al. n.d., 9). While the details of these incentives and how they would actually work are missing from the final report of the Oregon state language roadmap, the ideological and institutional thrust of linking language to the market is clear. Critical to state government taking on the institutional role of making language policy choices in which the “language market” can function and flourish is having legislative supporters who can push through the necessary legislation on the state level. According to Colin Crocker (2010), a member of the research team for the Oregon state language roadmap, Oregon, unlike some other states, had state legislators willing to introduce appropriate legislation. The 2008 US financial crisis and ensuing recession, however, sealed the legislation’s failure in the Ways and Means Committee of the state legislature. The concern is that in waiting for the economic recovery, legislative support will fade away.¹⁰ In the wake of the financial crisis, neither the state government nor the private sector floated an approach explicitly linking job growth and multilingualism as part of a viable solution to the economic downturn.¹¹ Instead, the old bugbear of translating economic insecurity into linguistic xenophobia – the linguistic ideology of the English-Only movement (see Cohen 2001) – surfaced in the Oregon case. Oregon legislators were wary of passing legislation that could be interpreted as favouring Spanish speakers, the largest heritage community in Oregon (Crocker 2010). For example, it was apparent that the state bill introduced to provide scholarships to students “with strong foreign language skills [would] directly

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benefit heritage populations as it places a premium on the skills students already possess” (Crocker 2011). This made at least some state legislators balk at the proposed legislation. As the final report noted, “the greatest threat to the Roadmap is the emotional and politically charged immigration debate” (Center for Applied Second Language Studies et al. n.d., 6). The tendency to portray Spanish-speaking immigrants as “stealing” jobs from anglophones rather than contributing to economic growth undermines the institutional and rhetorical base for a flourishing language market even in the best of economic times. Another aspect of “the emotional and politically charged immigration debate” in the United States is the charge, frequently made by the EnglishOnly movement as well as others, that immigrants, particularly those who do not speak English, burden the public service system. The Oregon language roadmap process attempted to incorporate public service representatives as stakeholders in the development of the state language roadmap. Indeed, Oregon is considered the most successful of the three states that had language summits in the summer of 2007 because of the range of stakeholders or “adopters” who jumped on board (Crocker 2010). Nevertheless, the public service sector was never as vocal or enthusiastic as the private sector, perhaps because of the politically sensitive nature of their language needs: the survey of language needs of stakeholders found that “those in emergency services, human services, and health care sectors, preferred to have a language-proficient workforce who are capable of reading and writing in Spanish” (Beisembayeva et al. 2007, 2). The final report, presumably in an effort to beef up the appearance of the rather flaccid public sector participation, lumped the public sector in with the private sector by labelling both “employers” and concluding that “public and private employers … are the primary drivers” of the roadmap (Center for Applied Second Language Studies et al. n.d., 1). However, once again, framing multilingualism as a stimulus to job market growth – this time in the public sector – was absent. Given the US tradition of decentralized education systems and the Oregon language roadmap’s emphasis on improving foreign language proficiency of students in anticipation of those students entering the state or local workforce, the involvement of local school districts was solicited as well. In the United States, school districts are constituted at the local level (below state level) and vary greatly in size. Labelled “community support-

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ers” in the Oregon language roadmap process (Beisembayeva et al. 2007, 20), most, but not all, school districts in Oregon were supportive of the language roadmap process, despite being wary of unfunded mandates. The focus on financial incentives supported through state-level legislation in the Oregon language roadmap helped to mitigate their wariness. Nevertheless, at least one school district was unsupportive because of “the local population’s belief that everyone should focus on obtaining knowledge of English” (Beisembayeva et al. 2007, 20–1). As this case illustrates, despite state action on a new language policy initiative, entrenched conceptions of language based on the linguistic ideology promoted by the English-Only movement prevailed. By enlisting private and public sector employers as well as community supporters and state legislators in the process, the Oregon state language roadmap claims to have “revealed and galvanized significant political support for quality language education. This support appears to have been latent or unfocused before the Oregon Roadmap process brought together concerned parties from business, government, and education to the table where they discovered mutual interests” (Center for Applied Second Language Studies et al. n.d., 5). Oregon’s at least partial success at mobilizing a coalition in support of a more formal and coherent language regime that overcomes the bifurcation of the past suggests the time for change has come. The key to success appears to be embedding change in the American traditions of economic liberalism and decentralization. C ON C LUS I ON

The Oregon case study suggests that state language roadmaps potentially feed into a new language regime for the United States, one that overcomes the bifurcation of US language policy between an assimilationist domestic dimension and an international dimension that reacts to foreign language crises, by harnessing linguistic diversity in the United States to meet its international needs. The question remains as to how enduring and significant the change is. In the Oregon case, as well as in Texas (see notes 9 to 11), that lasting change appears to depend on a stable and better yet growing economy. Despite the economic setback, it is worth noting that California in 2010 and Rhode Island in 2012 developed language roadmaps with nsep support. Utah also has developed a state language roadmap on

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its own initiative, without nsep . The federal tradition of states being the laboratory of policy experiments eventually applied nationally bodes well for the emergence of a new language regime. More problematic may be assessing the significance of the change. By embedding the change in liberal market ideology and political institutions, the language regime becomes a means to achieve goals of economic competitiveness, primarily global, and, by stealth, national security. The value of multilingualism in and of itself is not underscored, nor is language policy conceptualized as a public policy that serves the educational and social, in addition to the economic, needs of the local population. As Terence Wiley (2007, 200) puts it, “it is unlikely that the narrow focus on national security and ‘strategic’ languages in the national interest will do much in the long term to promote the study of languages in the US. What is needed is confrontation with the denial of linguistic diversity of the US – both currently and historically – as expressions of the myth of the linguistically homogenous nation-state.” Most likely, the significance of state language roadmaps will remain hostage to the path dependency of linguistic hegemony and state inaction in the face of economic uncertainty. At least and at best, a different conceptualization and practice of multilingualism based on valuing linguistic diversity will inflect debate over language policy choices in the United States.

NOTES

1 An earlier version of this chapter was developed for, presented at, and supported by the Alliance de recherche université-communauté project entitled “Les savoirs de la gouvernance communautaire” under the direction of Linda Cardinal at the University of Ottawa. I would also like to thank Stephanie Burkhalter at Humboldt State University for comments on a later draft of the chapter. 2 English has, however, been enshrined in a number of state constitutions (see Tatalovich 1995). 3 These criteria in turn implied a numerical criterion. 4 At the federal level, the Bilingual Education Act was retitled the English Language Acquisition Act in 2001 and incorporated in the Bush Administration’s controversial No Child Left Behind policy (Edwards et al. 2008/09). 5 I was a member of the advisory group from 2006 to 2009. 6 Anecdotal evidence suggests that their assessment was correct: in 2007, in an informal chat I had with graduate student recipients of nsep funding, some from the previously radical University of California at Berkeley, none were aware of the

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7

8

9

10

11

politics surrounding the program. Further anecdotal evidence reveals that, despite the d od administering nsea , nsep ’s actual civilian administrators had no military rankings or links – indeed, they were virtually all liberal Democrats in their political leanings. At an even more local level, nsep also sponsored a Metro Language Series in a number of port cities (San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, dc , New York). This series functioned in a similar fashion to the language summits-language roadmaps at the state level. It is beyond the present scope to go into detail about this initiative. The final report (Center for Applied Second Language Studies n.d., 2) notes that Oregon is in competition with its neighbouring states, Washington and California, for international markets. Given that funding was initially coming from the d od and that it is not normally the d od ’s purview to work at state level, in states like Texas it enlisted the support of “regional quality of life liaisons” (see www.usa4militaryfamilies.dod.mil), who are basically its fieldworkers for active military and veterans at the state level (Crocker 2010). Unlike Texas, there are no major defence contractors or military bases in Oregon to function as likely adopters. In the Texas case, which began later than Oregon’s, state legislative support never really materialized: “The involvement of state and local governments has been poor and sporadic given the other more important issues, economy and budget shortfalls” (Yam 2010). Again, the Texas case further illustrates the inability of the state language roadmap process to break through the dominant paradigm: according to the project director, “at least a few companies … declined to participate [even in the needs assessment survey, let alone the language summit, because they] were more concerned about their decline in business/layoffs rather than the state of language education” (Yam 2010).

REFERENCES

Beisembayeva, Lidiya, Colin Crocker, Sandra Macial del Villar, Omar Ortiz, and Michael Hubbard. 2007. University of Oregon Preliminary Research Report, 2007 U.S. Language Summit, Oregon, Roadmap to Language Excellence. Eugene: The Center for Applied Second Language Studies, University of Oregon. Cardinal, Linda. 2011. “L’avenir du français dans un Québec interculturel.” Paper presented at the Symposium international sur l’interculturalisme, Montreal, Université du Québec à Montréal, 25–27 May. Center for Applied Second Language Studies, University of Oregon, and the Language Flagship. n.d. Language Roadmap for the 21st Century: Oregon. Eugene. Accessed 12 August 2011. http://casls.uoregon.edu/pdfs/ OregonRoadmapFinalReport.pdf.

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Cohen, Edward S. 2001. The Politics of Globalization in the United States. Washington, dc : Georgetown University Press. Crawford, James. 2000. “The Political Paradox of Bilingual Education.” In At War with Diversity: U.S. Language Policy in an Age of Anxiety, edited by James Crawford, 84–103. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Crocker, Colin. 2011. “Oregon Language Roadmap.” July. (Unpublished; not disseminated). – 2010. Telephone interview. 29 November. Edwards, J. David. 2010. “National Language Leadership: A Critical Gap,” Discourse (Fall): 3. http://www.thelanguageflagship.org/images/documents/ 223444_iie_fall-final.pdf. Edwards, J. David, Ashley L. Lenker, and Dara Kahn. 2008/2009. “National Language Policies: Pragmatism, Process, and Products.” The nectfl Review 63 (Fall/Winter): 2–42. “Flagship Centers Unveil Language Roadmaps.” 2008. Discourse (Spring): 1–2. http://www.thelanguageflagship.org/newsletter/Spring2008_Issue2.pdf. Gutierrez, Juan Manuel. 1987. “The Political Dynamics of Bilingual Education: A Retrospective Study of Interest Groups.” p hd diss., Stanford University. h-Asia. 2003. “h -Asia: Congress Moves to Regulate Area Studies.” Posting on h-Asia listserv [h [email protected]]. 19 November. Kloss, Heinz. 1977. The American Bilingual Tradition. Rowley, ma : Newbury House. Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liu, Amy. 2009. “The Politics of Language Regimes.” p hd diss., Emory University. ndea (National Defense Education Act). 1958. Statutes at Large 72 (part 1): 1,580– 605 (P.L. 85–864). Washington, dc : US Government Printing Office. Riddle, Wayne C. 1992. “National Security Education Act of 1991: Summary and Analysis,” crs Report for Congress crs -92-68-epw , 15 January. Library of Congress, Washington, dc : Congressional Research Service. Schmidt, Ronald. 2009. “English Hegemony and the Politics of Ethno-Linguistic Justice in the US.” In Language Allegiances and Bilingualism in the US, edited by M. Rafael Salaberry, 132–50. Buffalo, ny : Multilingual Matters. Schneider, Susan Gilbert. 1976. Revolution, Reaction, or Reform: The 1974 Bilingual Education Act. New York: Las Americas. Secada, Walter G. 1990. “Research, Politics, and Bilingual Education.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 508: 81–106. Sick, Gary. 1986. All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter with Iran. New York: Penguin. Slater, Robert. 2009. Personal electronic communication from the director of nsep to nsep Group of Advisors, 21 July. – 2006. Personal electronic communication from the director of nsep to the author, 18 July.

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Sonntag, Selma K. 1990. “The U.S. National Defense Education Act: Failure of Supply-Side Language Legislation.” Language, Culture and Curriculum 3 (2): 151–71. – 1997. “Language Contact in the United States: Symbolism and Saliency,” In Recent Studies in Contact Linguistics, edited by Wolfgang Wölck and Annick De Houwer, 356–64. Bonn: Dümmler. – 2003. The Local Politics of Global English: Case Studies in Linguistic Globalization. Lanham, md : Lexington Books. Tatalovich, Raymond. 1995. Nativism Reborn? The Official Language Movement and the American States. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Teitelbaum, Herbert, and Richard Hiller. 1977. “The Legal Perspective.” Bilingual Education: Current Perspectives (1): 1–64. Voting Rights Act of 1965 – Extension. 1975. U.S. Code. P.L. 94–73. 94th Congress, 1st session (6 August): 400–6. Wiley, Terrence G. 2007. “The Foreign Language ‘Crisis’ in the United States: Are Heritage and Community Languages the Remedy?” Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 4 (2–3): 179–205. Yam, Kwee Lan. 2010. E-mail correspondence with the project director of the Texas Language Roadmap, June 23.

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3 The Irish Language Regime and Language Ideology in Ireland J OHN WA L S H

As a relatively young state, Ireland is an interesting case study of language regime that reveals a number of stark contradictions. Following a campaign of linguistic and cultural revival in the final decades of the nineteenth century, in 1922 the new Irish state declared that Irish was to be maintained as the community language in its heartland, the Gaeltacht, and revived elsewhere as the general means of communication. However, no government since independence has adopted a vigorous and programmatic approach to implementing those policy aims, with the result that the Irish language regime has been characterized by contradictions. All significant policy initiatives in recent years have been achieved due to vigorous campaigns by civil society and are not a result of the magnanimity of government. In recent decades, the cultural nationalist rhetoric of revival has been replaced with a more classic liberal approach, which emphasizes individual language rights and a shift in discourse from the ideology of Irish as a “national” to a minority language. In this chapter, I sketch the Irish language regime and consider its links to the political traditions of the state as well as to broader theoretical issues of language policy and language ideology. Based on Sonntag and Cardinal’s (this volume, 6) definition of language regimes as “language practices as well as conceptions of language and language use as projected through state policies and as acted upon by language users,” I define the Irish language regime since 1922 as comprising, on the one hand, a set of formal state policies that govern the status, acquisition, and use of Irish and, on the other, the responses of speakers and learners to such policies. However, drawing on analytical tools of critical language policy and language

ideology, it is also useful to consider “covert” and “overt” language policies that operate at different levels and are driven by often contradictory language ideologies (Shohamy 2006; Ricento 2006; Walsh 2012b). Despite the rhetoric about Irish, the influence of liberalism has continued to displace cultural nationalism since the foundation of the state, fostering a language regime that gives English an implicit if not explicit dominance. This perspective draws attention to the fact that a formal language regime may be undermined by a fundamentally contradictory language ideology held by the very agencies charged with operationalizing the regime in the first place. B A C KGR OUN D A N D D EMO G R A P H Y

According to census returns, the percentage of Irish speakers on the island of Ireland fell from 24.5 per cent in 1861 to only 17.6 per cent in 1911 (Central Statistics Office 2006, 11). It was in this context of sustained language shift from English to Irish that revivalist organizations were established in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, most famously the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) in 1893. The revival movement has been caricatured as essentialist and anti-modern, and while it undeniably contained such elements it also contained radical strands that wished to link linguistic and socio-economic renewal as part of the independence project (Ó Conchubhair 2009; Walsh 2012a). Many key figures in the Gaelic League went on to occupy key positions in the first government of the Irish Free State in 1922, so it was perhaps unsurprising that the new state proclaimed the ambitious “mega-policy” of revival or gaelicization (Ó Murchú 1985; Mac Giolla Chríost 2005; Ó Riagáin 2008; Ó Tuathaigh 2011). From 1922 onward, the new state granted Irish significant legal and administrative status as part of the institutionalization of the language following colonial rule. It adopted a three-pronged approach that involved both language revival and language maintenance: Irish was to be maintained in those areas where it was still traditionally spoken, known collectively as the Gaeltacht (see below), and restored “as the language of popular, everyday use in the rest of Ireland” (Ó Riagáin 1988, 30–1). The third part of the strategy was to provide the necessary infrastructure for such maintenance and revival. Some authors identify various phases of language policy that may be summarized here as (a) institutionalization and revival (or gaelicization) from 1922–65 and (b) bilingualism since 1965 (Ó Murchú and Ó

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Murchú 1999, 14; Ó Riagáin 1988, 29–52; Mac Giolla Chríost 2005, 128). In a more recent contribution, Ó Riagáin (2008, 55) argues that the policy announcements “do not suggest that anything other than the establishment of a bilingual state was ever envisaged.” However, there is evidence, at least at the level of rhetoric, that the emphasis changed in the 1960s from gaelicization to bilingualism, and so for the purposes of this chapter the division between policy before and after 1965 will be maintained. Today, Irish is spoken as a minoritized language throughout Ireland.¹ It remains the predominant language in some communities in the Gaeltacht, mostly along the western seaboard. Individuals and networks of people in every county in the country also use it as a language of choice. Because Irish is a core subject at both the primary and secondary level (ages four to eighteen) of the education system, there has been a steady increase in the number of people who claim competence in it since the foundation of the state. According to the 2011 census, 41.4 per cent of the population of the Republic of Ireland (1.77 million people) reported that they could speak Irish. 12.2 per cent (519,181 people) said that they spoke Irish daily solely within the education system, and only 1.8 per cent (77,185 people) claimed to speak it daily outside the education system (Central Statistics Office 2012, 40–2). The census returns have been described as a “crude instrument” (Ó Murchú 2008, 67) as they do not yield clear information about overall linguistic or oral competence. Respondents are required to personally evaluate whether or not they can speak Irish, but are not given the opportunity to classify their level of ability. While the return of 1.8 per cent of daily speakers outside the education system is very small indeed, a survey found that about one in five people (22.6 per cent) reported using Irish fairly regularly, though almost the same number again reported that they rarely if ever used it (Mac Gréil and Rhatigan 2009, 112–14). Levels of knowledge and use of Irish in the Gaeltacht are much higher than the national figures. A large majority of the 96,628 Gaeltacht residents (68.5 per cent, or 66,238 people) claim the ability to speak Irish, and 24 per cent (23,175 people) report speaking it daily outside the education system. The highest percentage of daily speakers outside the education system is found in the Galway Gaeltacht, but this masks percentages as high as 85 per cent in some strongly Irish-speaking areas west of Galway City (Central Statistics Office 2012, 41; 2007, tables 7a , 37a , and 38a ). There is considerable variation in these figures from one Gaeltacht area to another, but

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while the actual number of speakers increased in the most recent census, the overall percentage of Irish speakers in the Gaeltacht is falling. T HE HI S TOR I CA L D E VELO P MEN T O F T H E I R ISH L ANGUAGE REGIM E

The language and cultural revival movement that preceded the foundation of the Irish Free State was a mixture of classic cultural nationalism (nationality, cultural uniqueness, continuity, tradition) and some elements of liberalism (the individual’s psychological needs, personal well-being, the rooted individual). This ideological base remained largely unaltered after the state’s foundation but it began to be questioned from the 1940s onward (Ó Tuathaigh 2011, 104). The first government of W.T. Cosgrave was economically and socially conservative and modelled closely on the British example. Joseph Lee (1989, 92) argues that it did not take an active interventionist role in any aspect of policy as “it broadly took the view that the state should do as little as possible.” It “clung to existing economic orthodoxies” and “nurtured … an aversion to the working class in general” (109). Behind the conservatism was a desire to impress the British: “Economic and social orthodoxy, defined by English pundits, would contribute to the political stability coveted by Cosgrave. It would reassure sceptical English, and Anglo-Irish, observers of the adult attitude of the infant government” (109). The Free State also inherited most of its apparatus from the British crown, including a highly centralized bureaucracy and civil service. This, in essence, was the state tradition in which the Irish language regime began to form after 1922. Such a cautious and narrow approach to state building did not bode well for the ambitious language policy announced by the new government. Institutionalization and Revival, 1922 to the 1950s

The first acts of the Irish Free State in formulating its language regime were in the legal and educational realms. Outside the Gaeltacht, Irish was to be revived rather than maintained. The state was to rely on the education system and public administration to attempt to reverse centuries of language shift to English. The legal backdrop for the policy was provided by the 1922 constitution, which granted equal status to Irish and English while recognizing the historical position of Irish. Irish was proclaimed the

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national language, while both it and English were to be official languages. The status of Irish was elevated in the new 1937 Constitution of Ireland (Bunreacht na hÉireann), which remains in force to this day: 1 The Irish language as the national language is the first official language. 2 The English language is recognised as a second official language. 3 Provision may, however, be made by law for the exclusive use of either of the said languages for any one or more official purposes, either throughout the State or in any part thereof. (Article 8, Bunreacht na hÉireann) Article 8, while significant, did not amount to the creation of rules about the use of Irish with or by the state because several decades elapsed before legislation would be enacted to implement its provisions (see below). However, it was an important step in the consolidation of a distinct Irish language regime. The Gaeltacht was a key part of the new state’s language policy, but confusion reigned over its precise extent and location. In 1925, the Cosgrave government appointed a commission to map the Gaeltacht and make recommendations for its consolidation. Areas of the southern, western, and northwestern coasts were classified into two categories of Gaeltacht: Fíor-Ghaeltacht (“true” Gaeltacht), where a minimum of 80 per cent of the population could speak Irish, and Breac-Ghaeltacht (partial Gaeltacht), where between 25 and 79 per cent could do so. The commission made recommendations on issues such as administration, education, emigration, and employment (Government of Ireland 1926; Walsh 2002). Most were never implemented due to concerns over their financial implications: the minister for finance, Ernest Blythe, despite being a strong supporter of Irish, is said to have taken “panic at the proposals” (Lee 1989, 134). In the decades that followed independence, the national legislature (Oireachtas) enacted various pieces of legislation that favoured the promotion of Irish in the Gaeltacht, including financial incentives for public servants working there and grants for families raising their children through Irish. Despite the recommendation that some form of permanent commission or similar institutional support for the Gaeltacht be established, this did not occur for another thirty years. The first Department of the Gaeltacht was created in 1956, followed by the Gaeltacht industrial development agency, Gaeltarra Éireann, in 1957. The initial duty of Gaeltarra was to take

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control of traditional Gaeltacht industries. However, in keeping with the new national economic policy, after 1965 it was permitted to begin to attract foreign direct investment. Ironically, just as it got its own dedicated state institutions, the extent of the Gaeltacht was reduced drastically after a review of its original boundaries (Ní Bhrádaigh et al. 2007). There was no coordination of language and socio-economic policy, however, and the failure to deal systematically with the linguistic and socio-economic challenges facing the Gaeltacht in the early years of the state underlined the limitations of the language regime during this period. Various attempts were made to enhance the status of Irish in public administration in the first two decades of independence. Irish was declared an essential subject in open competitions for general grade posts in the civil service. Officials who had spent five years in the service were tested to ensure they had enough competence in Irish to carry out their duties in that language. In professional and technical grade posts, qualified candidates who were competent in Irish were prioritized over those who were not. However, despite the obligation to demonstrate competency in Irish, there was no attempt to ensure that its usage levels increased, which was presumably among the overt language policy aims in the first place. No detailed records were kept about the use of Irish in each department of the civil service; no comprehensive revival plan containing clearly defined targets was developed; and, perhaps most critically, no legislation was passed at that time to give effect to the constitutional provisions on Irish (Ó Riain 1994, 33–4). Therefore, while the state created significant legal and institutional props for Irish during this period, the emerging language regime in these realms was more symbolic than programmatic. The most robust element of the policy was in education. Irish became compulsory in national schools, where it was to be taught for an hour a day, from 1922. From 1935, it was necessary to pass Irish in certificate examinations in order to pass the examinations overall. Opposition to compulsion grew throughout the 1920s and ’30s: a common complaint was that compulsion was not assisting in the revival of Irish, but turning the public against it (Kelly 2002, 18–21). Implicit in this complaint was that the schools were failing to achieve their goal. However, this claim raises fundamental questions about the nature of that goal in the first place. To expect that teaching Irish for a limited time each day would revive it as the general language of communication was unrealistic in the extreme, particularly given the contemporary sociolinguistic reality of a predominantly English-

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speaking Ireland, the less than comprehensive approach to gaelicizing the civil service, and the failure to create other extra-school opportunities to use Irish. Just as the policy may have been about to bear fruit in terms of creating competent second language speakers, it was abandoned in the 1940s in the face of teachers’ opposition (Kelly 2002, 49–51). The reemergence of the Irish-medium sector since the 1970s is discussed below. In general, the period following the foundation of the state was characterized by the assumption that a policy that leaned heavily on the teaching of Irish (primarily as a subject only) to all children would lead to the revival of Irish as a normal language of everyday communication in Ireland. Limited symbolic support such as regulations for civil service recruitment and constitutional recognition would bolster this aim, but the government would do little in practice to gaelicize its own operations on a daily basis, or to create opportunities to use Irish outside the education system. It is arguable whether or not revival would have been possible in the 1920s, given the weakened state of Irish by that time, or whether or not the stated goal was merely aspirational and was never seriously considered. However, viewed from a language policy perspective, the approach was deeply flawed: the gap between the goal and the method chosen to achieve it was unbridgeable. There was no attempt to develop a programmatic approach to the policy, and there were no mechanisms in place to monitor its implementation within key state institutions. Within forty years, impatience with the original policy was rising and the ideology behind it was being questioned. The Irish language regime was also marred by the fact that many of Ireland’s intellectuals, rightly or wrongly, associated it with a stultifying and anti-intellectual social conservatism based on traditional Catholic values. What had been a radical message in the early twentieth century was by the 1960s perceived as part of the barren rhetoric of official cultural policy (Ó Tuathaigh 2011, 83–4). Bilingualism, 1965 to the Present

A critical language policy shift came in the mid-1960s, in parallel with a vigorous national debate about Ireland’s socio-economic development. As the generation of political leaders who had founded the state approached retirement, orthodoxies of all types came under the spotlight – social, economic, cultural, and linguistic. One of Éamon de Valera’s final acts as Taoiseach (prime minister) was to establish the Commission on the

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Restoration of the Irish Language in 1958. Despite the elapse of at least six decades since the beginning of the cultural revival, the commission’s report reaffirmed its support for a remarkably static and stagnant version of the original policy: Irish should be revived as the general means of communication “in order to consolidate our nation” and “to save the native mind” (cited in Ó Tuathaigh 2011, 87–9, my translation). The government’s response was more sober, and was contained in a white paper published in 1965 in response to the commission’s recommendations. The introduction included a reference to “the national aim” in relation to Irish, but rather than referring to revival, the wording was more cautious: “The national aim is to restore the Irish language as a general medium of communication. This aim will necessarily take much time and effort to achieve, notwithstanding the present state of knowledge of Irish and the goodwill which people in general feel towards it” (Government of Ireland 1965, 4). Rather than the general medium of communication, the aim was for Irish to become a general medium of communication in the future. Later in the introduction, the retreat from the original aims is reiterated and a “new realism” emerges (Ó Ciosáin 1988, 266): “Irish must have primacy as the national language and every effort will be made to extend and intensify its use. Nevertheless, for a considerable time ahead, English will remain the language chiefly used outside the Gaeltacht for various purposes. To assume otherwise would be unrealistic and detract from appreciation of the effort needed to achieve the national aim in regard to Irish” (Government of Ireland 1965, 10). The white paper also contained references to the importance of English in Ireland (Government of Ireland 1965, 10–11). For the first time, the Irish government, which since independence had pursued an official policy of revival, admitted that English would remain dominant outside the Gaeltacht, “for a considerable time ahead” (Government of Ireland 1965, 10). By inference, the “national aim in regard to Irish” was henceforth to be bilingualism rather than revival. However, the government did not spell out precisely what role it envisaged for Irish within a bilingual society nor how such a change was to be achieved. Another significant marker of the policy shift came in the late 1960s and early ’70s in the realm of education. In 1969, the opposition centrist Fine Gael party and the smaller left-wing Labour Party pledged to end “compulsory Irish” if elected. Their proposal was supported wholeheartedly by a new organization, the Language Freedom Movement. The Fine Gael/ Labour coalition delivered on its promise after coming to power in 1973:

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Irish was removed as a compulsory subject in order to pass the final state Leaving Certificate examination and as a compulsory subject for the civil service entrance examinations. To compensate for this, bonus marks were to be awarded in internal promotion competitions to candidates proficient in both official languages (Ó Murchú 2006, 9). This new provision was not applied uniformly, however, and the net result has been to diminish drastically the ability of the public service to deal with the public in Irish (see below). Irish was to remain a core subject up to the Leaving Certificate examination, a status it retains to the present day. However, the removal of the entry requirement to the civil service in particular was a significant modification to the rules associated with the knowledge of Irish and further diluted the language regime developed in the Irish Free State’s early years. The 1973–77 coalition was not the first time that Fine Gael was in power with Labour, but during previous periods of office it did not modify the cultural nationalism at the heart of the language regime established in 1922. Since the 1960s a liberal wing in Fine Gael began to question many state orthodoxies, including traditional support for revival. The association by some of Irish with conservatism supported this challenge to the language regime. However, at the same time as its considerable status in education was diluted, the Irish-medium education sector began to emerge once more from the beginning of the 1970s. Although the number of schools teaching partially or entirely in Irish fell dramatically from the 1940s onward, the period since the early 1970s has seen a partial reversal of that trend due to campaigns mounted by parents rather than any proactive government initiative. Irish-medium education outside the Gaeltacht has succeeded in creating many young speakers of the language who otherwise may not have had the opportunity to learn it. However, only a small minority of pupils has access to Irish-medium schools – in 2011, about 43,000 pupils or 6.5 per cent (Ní Neachtain 2012). The growth of Gaelscoileanna (Irishmedium education), based on the demands of parents who want it for their children, may be linked in part to the eclipse of cultural nationalism by liberalism after the sweeping cultural and social changes of the 1960s. Another example of additional institutional support for Irish provided during this period is found in the field of broadcasting. Just as the government was about to remove some of the major institutional props for Irish, it agreed following a hard-fought public campaign to establish a dedicated Irish language radio station for the Gaeltacht, Raidió na Gaeltachta, in 1972 (Watson 2002). The Irish language television station, Teilif ís na 70 | John Walsh

Gaeilge, was established in 1996, again as a result of a long campaign by Gaeltacht and Irish language activists, with the support of a diverse section of Irish society. The station, which is based in the Galway Gaeltacht, changed its name to tg 4 in 1999 (O’Connell, Walsh, and Denvir 2008). Another notable development in this period was the Belfast Agreement of 1998, in which the British government pledged to take “resolute action to promote” Irish in Northern Ireland (British-Irish Agreement Act 1999, 21). Most significantly, the agreement led to the establishment of a statutory cross-border body, Foras na Gaeilge, to promote Irish throughout Ireland. This subsumed the functions of the existing state board for Irish, Bord na Gaeilge, which had been established in 1978 (Walsh 2012a, 54–5). Since the 1930s, various radical Gaeltacht groups had been influenced by alternative political philosophies to those of cultural nationalism and liberalism. A dissident tradition, based on a mixture of nationalism and socialist or anti-imperialist ideologies, was apparent in some of the campaigns (Ó Tuathaigh 2011, 104). In the 1960s and ’70s, the Gaeltacht civil rights movement spawned a number of community cooperatives and development projects throughout the Gaeltacht. Growing public disillusionment with the work of Gaeltarra Éireann prompted calls for fundamental changes to the nature and role of the semi-state agency. One report emphasized the need for Gaeltacht development to encompass not only the economic, but also the social, cultural, and linguistic. Another called for a form of local government for the Gaeltacht, with a strong developmental role (Walsh 2012a, 304). In 1979, an act was passed to establish a new development body, Údarás na Gaeltachta. However, despite the public clamour for reform, the changes were largely cosmetic and there was little difference in terms of policy or structures between the Údarás and its predecessor. The only significant difference was that several board members would henceforth be elected by the public rather than selected by the minister (Walsh 2012a, 303). In 2000, in response to concerns about the decline of the Gaeltacht, the government established another Gaeltacht Commission that it charged with making proposals on how to stem the decline. The commission’s report made several recommendations, including enacting language legislation, restructuring Údarás, and, most significantly, creating a national language-planning framework (Coimisiún na Gaeltachta 2002, 19). Based on these recommendations, a major research report on the status and use of Irish in the Gaeltacht was published in 2007. The report concluded that Irish was very weak as a community language in much of Irish Language Regime and Ideology in Ireland | 71

the official Gaeltacht, and warned that it would remain the predominant community language of the strongest districts only for another fifteen to twenty years “without a major change to language-use patterns” (Ó Giollagáin et al. 2007, 27). Following the publication of the report, political pressure mounted on government to introduce a national plan or strategy for Irish. At the end of 2006, the government issued a statement on the Irish language and promised to develop a twenty-year strategy within a two-year period (Government of Ireland 2006). The 20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language was published in 2010 at a time of major economic turmoil shortly after Ireland was bailed out by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union (Government of Ireland 2010). The timing could not have been more unfortunate and, despite ambitious proposals across a wide range of policy areas, the strategy’s implementation has been less than convincing. One tangible result of the strategy is the Gaeltacht Act 2012, which obliges local organizations in the Gaeltacht to adopt language-planning principles and devise local Irish language plans. It also grants Údarás language planning powers and allows non-traditional Irish-speaking communities to seek special status as “Irish language networks.” The enactment of the legislation was controversial, and all opposition parties in the Dáil (lower house of parliament) walked out en masse because of the government’s guillotining of the debate and refusal to accept even one amendment (O’Halloran 2012). Furthermore, the bill’s passage was accompanied by drastic reductions in the funding of state and voluntary bodies for the Gaeltacht, who are expected to engage in language planning with greatly reduced resources. Other significant policy supports, such as financial incentives for Gaeltacht families raising their children with Irish, have been discontinued. As a backdrop to the developments outlined above, a new dynamic in relation to Irish has been identified from the late 1980s onward, which I call “minoritization” in the context of bilingualism. Mac Giolla Chríost (2005, 176–7, 190–1) argues that Irish has become associated increasingly with a civic rather than ethnic nationalism, and that the discourse has changed from that of a national language to one of a minority language to which matters of linguistic equality and linguistic rights apply. Such a strengthening of liberal political ideology and a parallel retreat from cultural nationalism helped create the context for the 2003 Official Languages Act, which I will discuss in the next section. Two dominant characteristics of the period of bilingualism may be identified: (a) the dismantling of national institutional props for Irish, a 72 | John Walsh

retreat from the state’s mega-policy on Irish, and an acknowledgement of the growing global importance of English, and (b) the move toward a more fragmented and reactive approach in the context of minority rights, involving the establishment of institutions for the Gaeltacht and in other domains invariably in response to public pressure. In conclusion, therefore, the Irish language regime became more blurred and vague during this period. Developments since 2003: The Official Languages Act

The period since the beginning of the new millennium has been marked by a plethora of activities related to the Irish language regime. Irish has been granted additional institutional supports in a relatively short period, but whether institutional capacity can deliver the policy improvements desired remains to be seen. It is also unclear whether future governments will remain committed to them, and the language regime was further undermined by the deep economic recession that hit Ireland in 2008. In this final section, I examine one such initiative, the Official Languages Act, in greater detail. Based on the type of linguistic rights model identified in the late 1980s and influenced by legislation in Wales and Canada, the Official Languages Act was enacted in 2003, eighty-one years after the first Free State government first granted Irish constitutional recognition. This was an important development for the Irish language regime because it created, for the first time since the state’s foundation, a national legislative framework for the delivery of bilingual services by the state. These rules stipulate when and where Irish is to be used in the delivery of public services, a development that has the potential to sharpen the definition of the Irish language regime if it can be institutionalized. The enactment of the legislation marked the culmination of a campaign to reflect in legislation the constitutional provisions in relation to Irish. This campaign intensified in the 1970s, after the requirement for all public service employees to be competent in Irish was removed. The legislation, which aims to increase gradually the level of public services offered in Irish, covers over 650 public bodies. Three categories of obligation exist under the act: direct obligations, covering mainly written material, for instance annual reports, and correspondence with the public; obligations based on ministerial regulations, related mostly to signage and oral announcements; and obligations based on language schemes, specifically Irish Language Regime and Ideology in Ireland | 73

internal language plans by each body outlining how services in Irish will be increased over time. There are limited provisions about the language capabilities of public bodies serving the Gaeltacht, but there is no direct obligation on the state to make Irish its default language in its dealings with the Gaeltacht’s citizens. Based on the Canadian experience, a language commissioner (Coimisinéir Teanga) was appointed to monitor the implementation of the legislation (Walsh and McLeod 2008). However, the legislation, itself a key component of the language regime, reveals internal contradictions. Although the act was sought by fluent Irish speakers who wished to conduct their business with the state in Irish, a large proportion of the statutory language schemes of the public bodies promotes a contradictory ideology of symbolic support for Irish that undermines the delivery of services to fluent speakers (Walsh 2012b, 335). Another fault with the language schemes relates to the role of the Department of Arts, Heritage, and the Gaeltacht itself, the government entity responsible for its implementation. The system of schemes is intended to lead to enhanced services in Irish over time, as each scheme is supposed to be replaced by a stronger one after three years. However, there has been a steady decline since 2007 in the pace at which the department has ratified schemes, and a majority have expired without being renewed (An Coimisinéir Teanga 2012, 21–9). Furthermore, on foot of formal investigations, the language commissioner has found that various public bodies have failed to implement key aspects of the act itself and of other enactments about Irish, revealing reluctance by elements of the public service to comply with the language regime. For instance, the Department of Social Protection was found to have not properly awarded bonus marks to officials proficient in both Irish and English in internal promotion competitions (An Coimisinéir Teanga 2012, 45). The slow or reluctant implementation of language legislation suggests that parts of the public service are at best less than enthusiastic about it, which reveals a further fault line in the language regime. Following an electoral commitment, the Irish government in November 2011 announced a review of the Official Languages Act. Before the review had commenced in any meaningful way, the government announced that the functions of the language commissioner were to be merged with those of the ombudsman as part of a broader rationalization of the public service due to the economic crisis. By December 2013, the results of the review had still not been published and the commissioner resigned in protest,

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citing the delay and other examples of government inaction regarding the act. This led to uncertainty about the future of the language commissioner’s office and the future shape of the act itself (Walsh 2012b). Any significant dilution of the legislative provisions on Irish would amount to a major modification of the language regime. C ON C LUS I ON

These developments in the area of Irish language policy reveal several contradictions within the language regime. On the one hand, the Irish state obliges all children to study the language for an average of fourteen years in school and most universities in the state require a pass in Irish for entry. On the other hand, it remains largely unable to deal in Irish with those citizens who wish to conduct public business in it, and there is a risk that the already limited legislative provisions will be diluted further. There are only weak statutory provisions, and no guarantees, about the delivery of public services in Irish in the Gaeltacht, where most habitual Irish speakers are concentrated. A second tension exists between the 2010 major policy initiative, the 20Year Strategy for the Irish Language, and subsequent government decisions to undermine or remove many policy supports for Irish, particularly in the Gaeltacht. Thirdly, the language legislation is supposed to institutionalize the delivery of high-quality public services for fluent Irish speakers, but statutory language plans are replete with proposals that cater instead to the larger group of people who understand some Irish but do not speak it fluently. Finally, although the state proclaims that Irish is the national language and the first official language, English is overwhelmingly dominant throughout the state apparatus and in public and private life. Furthermore, the language policy aims are continuously tempered by a powerful ideology of English monolingualism (sometimes combined with simplistic multiculturalism; see, e.g., Elster 2006) and an economic policy that is becoming increasingly utilitarian as the economic crisis continues. These powerful covert ideologies considerably modify and condition any “rules” about where Irish can or cannot be used (for instance, those contained in the Official Languages Act). The current Irish language regime has been amended significantly since 1922: from a state tradition founded on cultural nationalism with elements of liberalism, the ideological focus has

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shifted toward liberalism and minority rights, with flurries of interest in more radical philosophies emerging within civil society from time to time. While the overt language policy of the formal pre-eminence of Irish persists, the covert language policy perpetuates the dominance of English and an overwhelmingly monolingual state. As a result, although it continues to play an important role as a symbol of ethnocultural identity, Irish has become increasingly minoritized and marginalized in its own nation-state.

NOTE

1 In this chapter, I deal only with the Irish state and do not consider Irish language policy in Northern Ireland except where cross-border language initiatives are relevant.

REFERENCES

An Coimisinéir Teanga. 2012. Tuarascáil Bhliantúil/Annual Report 2011. An Spidéal: Oifig an Choimisinéara Teanga. Central Statistics Office. 2007. Census 2006, Volume 9: The Irish Language. Cork: Central Statistics Office. Dublin: Stationery Office. – 2012. This Is Ireland: Highlights from Census 2011, Part 1. Dublin: Stationery Office. Coimisiún na Gaeltachta. 2002. Tuarascáil/Report. Dublin: Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands. Elster, Naomi. 2006. “Flogging a Dead Language.” Irish Times, 21 February. Government of Ireland. 1926. Gaeltacht Commission: Report. Dublin: Stationery Office. – 1965. Athbheochan na Gaeilge: The Restoration of the Irish Language. White Paper presented to Houses of Oireachtas. Dublin: Stationery Office. – 2006. Ráiteas i leith na Gaeilge 2006/Statement on the Irish Language 2006. Dublin: Stationery Office. – 2010. 20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language 2010–2030. Dublin: Stationery Office. Kelly, Adrian. 2002. Compulsory Irish: Language and Education in Ireland, 1870s–1970s. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Lee, Joseph J. 1989. Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mac Giolla Chríost, Diarmait. 2006. The Irish Language in Ireland: From Goídel to Globalisation. London: Routledge.

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Mac Gréil, Micheál, and Fergal Rhatigan. 2009. The Irish Language and the Irish People: Report on the Attitudes towards Competence in and Use of the Irish Language in the Republic of Ireland in 2007–08. Maynooth: National University of Ireland. Ní Bhrádaigh, Emer, Stephen G. McCarron, John Walsh, and Patrick Duffy. 2007. “Using gis to Map the Gaeltacht.” Irish Geography 40 (1): 98–108. Ní Neachtain, Áine. 2012. Personal communication with the author, Gaelscoileanna, 7 November. Ó Ciosáin, Séamus. 1988. “Language Planning and Irish.” In Language, Culture and Curriculum, edited by Eoghan Mac Aogáin, 263–80. Dublin: ité . Ó Conchubhair, Brian. 2009. Fin de Siècle na Gaeilge: Darwin, an Athbheochan agus Smaointeoireacht na hEorpa. Indreabhán: An Clóchomhar. Ó Giollagáin, Conchúr, Seosamh Mac Donnacha, Fiona Ní Chualáin, Aoife Ní Shéaghdha, and Mary O’Brien. 2007. Comprehensive Linguistic Study of the Use of Irish in the Gaeltacht. Dublin: Department of Community, Rural & Gaeltacht Affairs. Ó Laighin, Pádraig B. 2004. Towards the Recognition of Irish as an Official Working Language of the European Union: Brief Presented to the National Forum on Europe. Dublin: Clódhanna Teoranta. Ó Murchú, Helen, and Máirtín Ó Murchú. 1999. An Ghaeilge: A hAghaidh Roimpi/ Irish: Facing the Future. Dublin: European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages. Ó Murchú, Helen. 2008. More Facts about Irish. Dublin: European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages. Ó Murchú, Máirtín. 1985. The Irish Language. Dublin: Government of Ireland. – 2006. Ag dul ó chion? Cás na Gaeilge 1952–2002. Dublin: Coiscéim. Ó Riagáin, Pádraig. 1988. “Bilingualism in Ireland 1973–1983: An Overview of National Sociolinguistics Surveys.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 70: 29–52. – 2008. “Irish-Language Policy 1922–2007: Balancing Maintenance and Revival.” In A New View of the Irish Language, edited by Caoilfhionn Nic Pháidín and Seán Ó Cearnaigh, 55–66. Dublin: Cois Life. Ó Riain, Seán. 1994. Pleanáil Teanga in Éirinn: 1919–1985. Dublin: Carbad/Bord na Gaeilge. Ó Tuathaigh, Gearóid. 2011. “An Stát, an Fhéiniúlacht Náisiúnta agus an Teanga: Cás na hÉireann.” In Féiniúlacht, Cultúr agus Teanga i Ré an Domhandaithe, edited by Breandán Mac Cormaic, 76–112. Dublin: Coiscéim. O’Connell, Eithne, John Walsh, and Gearóid Denvir, eds. 2008. tg 4@10: Deich mBliana de tg 4. Indreabhán: Cló Iar-Chonnachta. O’Halloran, Marie. 2012. “Opposition Walks out in Protest at Guillotining of Debate on Gaeltacht Bill.” Irish Times. 20 July. Ricento, Thomas. 2006. “Theoretical Perspectives in Language Policy: An Overview.” In An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method, edited by Thomas Ricento, 3–10. Malden: Blackwell.

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Shohamy, Elana. 2006. Language Policy: Hidden Agendas and New Approaches. London: Routledge. Walsh, John, and Wilson McLeod. 2008. “An Overcoat Wrapped around an Invisible Man? Language Legislation and Language Revitalisation in Ireland and Scotland.” Language Policy (7): 21–46. Walsh, John. 2002. Díchoimisiúnú Teanga: Coimisiún na Gaeltachta 1926. Dublin: Cois Life. – 2012a. Contests and Contexts: The Irish Language and Ireland’s Socioeconomic Development. 2nd ed. Oxford: Peter Lang. – 2012b. “Language Policy and Language Governance: A Case-Study of Irish Language Legislation.” Language Policy (11): 323–41. Watson, Iarfhlaith. 2003. Broadcasting in Irish: Minority Language, Radio, Television and Identity. Dublin: Four Courts Press.

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4 Poland’s Language Regime Governing Kashubian and Silesian R O MA N S Z UL

The aim of this study is to analyze the evolution of the language regime governing two linguistic varieties in Poland, namely Kashubian and Silesian. As I will show in this chapter, this evolution is determined by both sociolinguistic and political factors, the latter including Poland’s state traditions. In the context of Poland’s current language regime,¹ the Polish state officially designates Kashubian as a regional language while Silesian is regarded as a dialect (or set of dialects) of Polish. However, given the contours of Poland’s state traditions and its evolving language regime, there is a new demand by at least some Silesian speakers for the state to award Silesian regional language status. Linguistically, there is a greater distance between Kashubian and standard Polish than between Silesian and Polish, although currently, perhaps surprisingly, Silesian has more linguistic vitality than Kashubian.² Politically, the notion of Kashubian as a language separate from Polish dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, while the demand for Silesian as a regional language only emerged in the 1990s. This study of the politics of Poland’s language regime in regard to Kashubian and Silesian is premised on the recognition that languages function two ways: as means of communication and as markers of identity. As means of communication, languages enable their users to access education, information, and public services. They allow them to present their views and express their emotions and creativity, and thus participate in economic, political, and social life. As markers or symbols of identity, languages divide people into “us” and “them,” and are sources of pride or shame. Languages’ sociopolitical status as reflected in a language regime

indicates the political power of their speakers (see Sonntag and Cardinal this volume, 7). Given the strong command of standard Polish by the vast majority of speakers of Kashubian and Silesian, which especially among younger and better educated persons is quite often better than the command of their ethnic idioms, it is doubtful that current efforts to advance the status of Silesian and Kashubian as languages are motivated by communication considerations such as making their speakers’ lives easier by giving them access to information, public services, education, and so on in their native tongues. Such an aim could have been rational about one hundred years ago, but since that time standard Polish and/or German have met the communicative function of language. Therefore, attempts to advance the two idioms as languages are predominantly or purely motivated by issues of identity. This is especially true for Kashubians. Their leaders and writers argue that Kashubians cannot survive as a specific group without their language (Obracht-Prondzynski 2003). They make this argument by appealing to different traditions. Romanticism underpins the desire to restore the “language of one’s ancestors” or one’s childhood, and thus to preserve the group’s existence. This seems to be a frequent motivation for those Kashubian parents who cannot speak Kashubian or do not speak it to their children, but who send them to learn Kashubian at school. A tradition of linguistic nationalism equates the sociopolitical status of language with the political influence, dignity, and pride of those who speak it, pretend to speak it, or otherwise consider it “theirs.” Linguistic nationalism is certainly an important driving force for some Kashubian and Silesian political activists and their organizations, including those who do not speak these languages.³ A newer, economic motivation can be described as “identity for sale” or “ethnicity for sale” (see Heller 2003 for a similar phenomenon among French-speaking minority communities in Canada), and uses ethnic attributes, including language, in advertisements as a tourist attraction or commodity. This is a widespread phenomenon in Kashubia. Of course, these traditions are not mutually exclusive. In some ways, the language regime that governs Silesian is more complex. Although a hotly debated issue related to both Kashubian and Silesian is – or was – whether they are dialects of Polish or separate languages, the linguistic definition of Kashubian is now less contested than that of Silesian. It should be stressed here that the question of whether Silesian is

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a dialect is sociopolitical rather than linguistic. As an expert to the Polish parliament in matters of Silesian language points out, there is no linguistic evidence that Silesian exists as a language separate from Polish dialects. Nevertheless, support for the idea of the Silesian language – as opposed to dialect – renders the denial of status of regional language a sociopolitical issue (Wyderka 2003; 2010; 2011). As regards the place of Kashubian and Silesian in Poland’s linguistic regime, generally speaking, Poland represents the widespread tradition, at least in Europe, of the nation-state model, with some concessions to minority and regional languages. Polish law recognizes three categories of language in its territory, apart from foreign languages: a national or official language (Polish), languages of officially recognized national minorities (minority languages), and a regional language. So far, Kashubian is the only officially recognized regional language, but there is a strong movement to gain such status for Silesian. The distinction between minority and regional languages is of nominal, or symbolic, character, without any legal differences in speakers’ rights. The use of the different terms “minority” and “regional” is a result of Poland’s nation-state tradition: minority status has been granted to communities of Poland’s citizens who do not belong to the Polish nation as a cultural, historical, and emotional community. The term “regional language” does not carry such a connotation. Minority and regional languages can be used in intra-community communication and as co-official (auxiliary) languages in communes that fulfil certain conditions (the number of speakers of regional/minority language exceeding 20 per cent of the population according to census declarations, and the decision of the commune’s authorities). K A S HUB I A N A N D SI LESI A N : LI NGUI S T I C A ND H I STO R I CA L B A CKG R O U N D

In order to understand the current linguistic regime that governs Kashubian and Silesian, it is necessary to first explore the historical and linguistic background of Kashubian and Silesian within the context of Polish state traditions. Kashubian is spoken in the central part of northern Poland, in the area of Gdansk, in the present Pomorskie (Pomeranian) voivodship (region), while Silesian is spoken in Upper Silesia – the central part of southern Poland, in the Sląskie (Silesian) voivodship. Each linguistic variety’s current area is smaller than it was several centuries ago, comprising

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only the extreme eastern part of its former territory. Kashubian and Silesian, along with standard Polish and other Polish dialects, belong to the vast group of Slavonic languages and more precisely to the sub-group of western Slavonic languages. In the past, linguistic differences between dialects of what is now southern and central Poland, including Silesia, were very small. Differences were greater between these dialects and those of Pomerania along the Baltic coast, now represented by Kashubian. These differences make Pomeranian (also called Kashubian) dialects easily distinguishable from other Polish (Slavonic) dialects and are a certain obstacle to understanding for outsiders. Particularly important in the further development of Silesian and Kashubian dialects were the political changes from the tenth century onward, especially the establishment of states and changes to borders, as well as the formation of national languages, migration, assimilation, and so on. The most important political events were the emergence and expansion in the tenth century of what is now called Poland (around Poznan and Krakow), and the territorial expansion of German states (or principalities) to finally encompass almost the whole territory of Silesia and Pomerania by the end of the eighteenth century. The ruling elites were recruited from the ethnic Polish (Slavic) population in the case of Poland and from the ethnic German or Germanized population in the German principalities, which had a strong impact on their language situation and linguistic regimes. Dialects of Poznan and Krakow became the basis for the highly prestigious language of the Polish royal court and gentry; this language later developed into standard Polish. Poland in the tenth century encompassed Silesia and Pomerania, but its power over them, especially the western part of the latter, was rather weak and short-lived. Neither Silesia nor Pomerania created a united, strong, and stable state whose ruling elite would be able to establish a unified and prestigious language. German states’ territorial expansion was accompanied by the immigration of ethnic Germans and the related expansion of the German language, culture, and identity. The Reformation and the split of the Christian church into Catholic and Protestant denominations changed that expansion. Protestantism in Prussia (Germany) accelerated assimilation of the local Protestant population to the German language and identity; while Catholicism isolated its believers from German society and thus enabled the retention of local dialects and “non-German” identity. As a consequence, in the nineteenth century,

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when both Silesia and Pomerania belonged to Germany, Slavonic dialects were spoken only in the eastern parts of these regions, mostly by the rural Catholic population. When Poland lost its independence at the end of the eighteenth century and its territory was divided between Prussia/Germany, Austria, and Russia, Polish identity and language were strong enough to resist the pressures of assimilation to the dominant languages and identities of those three states. This was mostly because the upper strata of Polish society – the aristocracy, educated people, and emerging bourgeoisie – did not feel inferior to the ruling Russians, Prussians, or Austrians, and still used Polish in private and public life. In addition, the foreign rulers made concessions to Polish culture and language to gain Poles’ sympathy or support. In the nineteenth century, the question of language and national or ethnic identity became extremely sensitive throughout Europe. Given the imperative of linguistic nationalism, Silesians and Kashubians had to choose the nation (ethnicity) to which they belonged and what language they spoke, among other things. Of course, it was not a formal obligation, but rather a moral duty in that “mood of the time.” Every person had to decide not only their own affiliation, but also whether to publicly demonstrate that choice or not. This was the era of national awakening: were Kashubian and Silesian languages, or dialects of Polish? For Catholic Kashubians, there were two competing ideas concerning their ethnic and national identity: that of being a separate (Slavic) nation speaking a separate language (they came to be called “Kashubian nationalists”), and that of being part of the Polish nation speaking a special Polish dialect (“Kashubian regionalists”). Both groups rejected the idea of being German. Protestant Kashubians switched their language to German and joined the German ethnic nation. German authorities adopted a double policy toward the “Kashubian question”: on the one hand, they forced assimilation to the German language, culture, and identity (Kulturkampf), while on the other hand, they retained Kashubian as a separate language, not a Polish dialect (Manczak 2002). According to the Polish national movement, German support for Kashubian was tactical – its only aim was to weaken Polish identity among Kashubians and thus make them less resistant to Germanization (Manczak 2002). Kulturkampf and the German support for the Kashubian language turned out to be counterproductive. Both nationalist and regionalist

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Kashubians realized that if Kashubians were to survive as a separate ethnic group, rather than being assimilated as the Kashubian Protestants were, they had to stick to the Polish national movement (Borzyszkowski et al. 1999). Most simply adopted a Polish national identity with its inherent respect for the Polish national language, and enthusiastically supported the idea of an independent Poland after World War i . Kashubians’ Polish identity was even further (and unintentionally) strengthened by Nazi German persecution during the occupation in 1939–45, when thousands were killed for that identity. In the time under consideration, there was no standard Kashubian language. Those who decided to write in it had to develop a literary form of Kashubian. Each author had their own version of the language, depending on their native dialect and political attitudes. Kashubian regionalists preferred to use Polish spelling and linguistic forms common to Kashubian and standard Polish, while Kashubian nationalists invented spelling and implemented linguistic forms that were different from Polish. Quite often, their texts were incomprehensible – not only to Poles from other regions, but also to Kashubians themselves. The situation in Prussian Silesia was considerably different from that in Kashubia. The conception of Silesian as a separate language was practically absent among the population; it was regarded as a Polish dialect (Wyderka 2010). At the same time, the social distance between the autochthonous population (even the Catholics) and the Germans was much smaller than in Kashubia, and assimilation to German language, culture, and identity was the norm. As a result, the Silesian-speaking population was the object of competition between two national traditions: German and Polish (Rykiel 1995). Speaking a local Silesian dialect was of secondary importance. For some people, speaking the local dialect was evidence of being Polish; for others, it was evidence of backwardness that should be abandoned in order to be modern and German. Those who declared themselves Poles and participated in Polish cultural life used or tried to use standard Polish (sometimes with local dialectal elements) when writing. There were practically no attempts to write in Silesian. Fluency in standard Polish was otherwise not widespread – most people did understand standard Polish, but had problems with speaking and writing in it. Yet another situation existed in Austrian Silesia. Of special importance is the eastern section called Teschen Silesia, a multiethnic and multidenominational region. The autochthonous population spoke a mostly local

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Silesian dialect and was Protestant. Numerous migrants from neighbouring Galicia, a region of the former Poland, were Catholic and spoke dialects that were quite similar to the local Silesian dialect. Added to this was a smaller but economically strong group of immigrants from Bohemia (Czech lands) who spoke Czech. In this area, Polish and Czech national traditions competed. There were also differing political ideas concerning the future state to which the region would belong: pro-Austrian, proPolish, and pro-Czech (Siwek 1997). Interestingly, neither religious affiliation nor the dialect spoken at home determined an individual’s national or political choices (except for the Czech-speaking population, which had a strong Czech ethnic and national identity and opted to belong to Czechoslovakia when Austria-Hungary was falling apart).⁴ No group raised the idea of Silesia as a separate nation, or of Silesian as a separate language. K A S HUB I A N A N D SI LESI A N I N MO D ER N P O L AND

After World War i , Poland re-emerged as an independent state. It encompassed practically the whole area populated by Kashubians and parts of Upper and Teschen Silesia. To deal with the language question, Polish authorities implemented a language regime based on the typical nation-state or “modernization” (in the Gellnerian sense of the word; see, e.g., Gellner 2006) model or tradition: establishment of standard Polish across the entire state territory in public institutions, including schools. There were some concessions to the linguistic rights of national minorities, especially to Germans in Upper Silesia. (There was also a vibrant Yiddish/Hebrew cultural life, an exploration of which exceeds the scope of this chapter.) Compulsory school education meant that, in Kashubia and Silesia, many people had contact with standard Polish for the first time outside of church services. The impact of school education on the linguistic behaviour of the rural population in particular was otherwise rather weak. Silesian was treated, both by its users and by Polish authorities, as a dialect, although its social position was stronger than that of dialects in other parts of Poland due to a weaker command of standard Polish. Kashubian’s situation was more complicated. Although the Kashubian language was absent in official institutions (e.g., schools), some literature, including plays, was still produced despite the unfavourable stance of the authorities, who were suspicious of “Kashubian separatism” and the local population’s lack of strong support.

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Parts of the contested areas of Upper and Teschen Silesia belonged to Germany and Czechoslovakia, respectively. The interwar period in Upper Silesia under German rule was a time of rapid spread in German language and identity, and the local Silesian dialects were used less. Most of those still speaking local Silesian dialects had little or no contact with, and no command of, standard Polish. After World War ii , Poland’s borders shifted westward. The whole Pomerania and (former Prussian) Silesia were incorporated into Poland. Some of the German population fled the area before the end of the war, and afterward more emigrated or were deported to Germany, according to decisions by the winning powers. Only ethnic Poles were allowed to remain. This gave rise to the question: who was Polish? This question was particularly relevant in Silesia, where it was very difficult to distinguish between ethnic Poles and Germans. To be considered Polish according to the evolving language regime based on the nation-state model, people had to meet two conditions: declare they were Polish, and present some knowledge, no matter how poor, of the Polish language, which included Silesian as a dialect of Polish. In Upper Silesia, many people (if not all who wanted to do so) passed this exam, which was called “verification.” This use of language as a criterion to verify citizenship was a prominent component of the linguistic regime of what was then Poland. Many people who could easily have passed the exam decided to migrate to Germany. A kind of verification was also performed in an area of Silesia that used to belong to Poland before the war. Its aim was to discover, punish, and/or deport people who had collaborated with the Nazis. Notwithstanding its causes, purposes, and results, the verification, together with the general atmosphere of suspicion toward the local population in the first years after the war, generated a feeling of harm and discrimination that shaped the memory of the people of Silesia in a way that differed from that of other inhabitants of Poland (Sekula 2010). This feeling and memory would eventually contribute to a kind of distancing between some Silesians and the rest of Poland, and to the emergence of Silesian regionalism and nationalism. As for the Kashubians, their territory grew somewhat when they moved into villages on the other side of the pre-war Polish-German border that inhabitants migrating to Germany had vacated. Here there was no need for verification. To compare the cases of Kashubia and Silesia, the path dependency of Poland’s language regime, established in the nineteenth century if not ear-

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lier, was evident. In Kashubia, the clear-cut division between Poles (as well as pro-Polish Kashubians) and Germans resulted in the incorporation of the whole area into Poland following World War i . After World War ii , ethnic Germans emigrated without waiting for the Polish authorities to decide their fates. In Silesia, the lack of such division, and the changing attitude of the local population toward Poland and Germany after World War ii , prompted Polish authorities to force the local population to choose between being Polish or German. Language was used as the criterion for being Polish, reaffirming a language regime based on the dominant nation-state model and stemming from Romanticism and linguistic nationalism state traditions but tempered by Poland’s complex historical context. From the end of World War ii until the 1980s, Poland continued along the path of the nation-state language regime. Polish was the only official language at all levels of public administration, although some recognized minorities (Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Lithuanians, Jews, Slovaks, and Czechs) were allowed to have their institutions and use their languages there. Due to the effects of migration and verification, officially there were no more Germans living in Poland. Kashubians were in a unique situation: because of their strong Polish identity, they did not claim minority rights, nor were authorities ready to grant them such a status. Nevertheless, Kashubian regionalism survived, represented mainly by the Kashubian-Pomeranian Association (established in 1956), which continued the traditions of Kashubian regionalism. It should be noted, for instance, that in 1974, thanks to the association’s activism, standard spelling for Kashubian was developed and adopted (Borzyszkowski et al. 1999). This spelling used mostly Polish letters (with some exceptions), which gave the impression that Kashubian was a corrupted form of Polish. Kashubian, as other dialects, was absent in schools, radio, television, place names, etc. In the post-war period, especially from the 1970s onward, there was a massive shift from the use of dialects to standard Polish. This was mostly due to progress in education (the authorities of socialist Poland paid great attention to free and obligatory education for the whole population) and to the spread of mass media, especially television. Those born in the 1950s were the first generation to receive primary and secondary education and thus fluent command of standard Polish; they and later generations stopped speaking dialects, and some minority languages, to their children.

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Only the older, unskilled rural population continued to speak these otherwise very stigmatized dialects. This also happened in Kashubia. This trend was, however, much weaker in Upper Silesia, despite its higher degree of urbanization and industrialization. For several reasons (including a weaker command of standard Polish, the higher self-esteem of Silesians, and a socio-historical distancing from the rest of Poland), the local population continued to speak Silesian dialects not only in family life and among close friends, but also in streets, shops, the workplace, and other contexts. Hence, the linguistic divide appeared between Upper Silesia and the rest of Poland. K A S HUB I A N A N D SI LESI A N : FR OM DI A LECTS TO R EG I O N A L L A N G U A G ES

The changes that occurred in Polish society and politics in the 1980s accelerated in the 1990s, which affected a shift in the language regime governing Kashubian and Silesian and finally led to Kashubian’s official status as a regional language and to the consideration of granting Silesian the same status. In the case of Kashubian, the prospect of extinction and the new political and cultural atmosphere in Poland spurred its defenders into action. For them, defending the Kashubian dialect/language was a way to defend the very existence of Kashubians as a separate group, because Kashubian was considered Kashubians’ central value and marker (Obracht-Prondzynski 2003). Their activity was twofold: cultural and political. In the cultural field, they intensified production of written works in Kashubian. Attempts were made to standardize the language, and in 1997 a new Kashubian spelling was adopted. This spelling made Kashubian more distinct from standard Polish, as it eliminated some Polish letters and introduced new ones absent in Polish. Production in Kashubian went beyond the traditional area of poetry and short stories and entered the sphere of science, although the most ambitious publications of this kind were accompanied by a parallel version in standard Polish (Borzyszkowski et al. 1999). To this end, a scientific terminology was developed (Gòłąbk 2011), and a standard variety of written Kashubian was established. Kashubian appeared in radio and television, and in otherwise mostly Polish local newspapers as special pages or columns. It was also used in church services and was an elective subject in nearly one hundred schools (see Mazurek 2010, 110). In Gdansk Univer-

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sity, it has appeared as an area of research and a subject taught to students, and has also been used in at least one ma dissertation as of the time of writing (Mazurek 2010, 112). It should be stated, however, that its presence in all these areas is rather modest. Conversely, Kashubian language, culture, and identity are the subject of intense research, much of which is carried out or supported and published by the Kashubian Institute (see, e.g., Obracht-Prondzyński 2007a; 2007b; Acta Cassubiana 2011; Mazurek 2010; Dołowy-Rybińska 2011; Woźniakiewicz 2013). Kashubian is present on the Internet, but there is no trace of it on regional government websites,⁵ and it is not used in the regional parliament or by the voivod (regional representative) of the central government in the Pomeranian voivodship. Surprisingly or not, Kashubian has become most visible in the area of tourism: inscriptions in Kashubian appear in several places, including in territories where almost nobody speaks Kashubian, often using bizarre spelling that is even more distant from standard Polish than the official spelling. Items such as postcards with sentences in Kashubian serve as souvenirs or tourist products (any relevant information for tourists and local residents being in Polish). It should be mentioned that for Kashubia, with its ocean vistas, forests, and lakes, tourism plays an important role in the local economy, attracting visitors from other parts of Poland. In the political realm, Kashubian activists tried to obtain official status for Kashubian (Łodziński 2007; Mazurek 2010, 99), but encountered resistance or reluctance from the authorities and most Kashubians. Until a few years ago, official status for languages other than Polish was granted only to minority languages. As mentioned earlier, considering Kashubian a minority language would mean that Kashubians would be regarded as a national minority and not ethnic Poles. This was not acceptable to either Polish authorities or most Kashubians. The solution came from the European Charter for Minority or Regional Languages and from its German interpretation. Although the Charter in fact did not distinguish between minority and regional languages, Germany, when accepting the document in 1999, distinguished between a minority language and a regional language, the latter being Low German (Plattdeutsch). Kashubian activists and Polish authorities followed suit. In 2005, the Polish parliament adopted a bill on National Minorities and a Regional Language. This regional language was Kashubian. Kashubian thus obtained official status for the first time. In 2009, Poland ratified the Charter and confirmed Kashubian’s status as a regional language. The bill and the Charter provide

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that communes fulfilling certain conditions have the right to use it as an auxiliary language. This shift in policy accompanies the dramatic sociopolitical changes in Poland in recent decades. But this new policy direction of standardization of Kashubian and its introduction to schools has been only partially successful, as many native Kashubian speakers (usually older people) consider the Kashubian learned by school children (often their grandchildren) a strange and artificial language. One may well wonder to what extent this new policy direction is a demonstration of Kashubian identity or merely an economic ploy to attract tourists. This newer conception of language as a commodity, rather than as a means of communication or a marker of identity, resonates with Poland’s post-communist shift to a consumption-driven market economy. The journey of Silesian to official recognition, which is still in progress at the time of writing, has been much more complicated. The reemergence of a German minority in the 1980s and its achievements has had special significance for the situation in Upper Silesia (Heffner and Solga 2003). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to analyze the reasons why many autochthonous inhabitants of Upper Silesia declared German ethnicity. But at the beginning of the 1990s, the German minority was officially recognized with all of the related ramifications. The activity and successes of the German minority on the one hand, and the successes of Kashubian regionalism on the other, as well as the trend of regionalism in Europe and in Poland, inspired Silesian regionalism. In this context, one can speak of a change in Poland’s state tradition, recognizing the increased role of regions and regionalism. The most radical organizations that represent this movement are the Movement for Silesian Autonomy and the Organization of the Population of Silesian Nationality, both led by the same person and comprising largely the same activists (see, e.g., Jałowiecki, Szczepański, and Gorzelak 2007, 256–78). Besides these, there are many groups and influential personalities with differing views on the definition of Silesians as a separate ethnic nation or an ethnic group of Poles, and on the past and future of Silesia (see Sekula et al. 2012). The aims of the movement’s radical wing currently include recognition of Silesian as a regional language (like Kashubian). At the beginning of the 1990s, the above-mentioned organizations, despite some spectacular political actions, were rather marginal, not only at the all-Polish but also at the regional Silesian level – they were only recently able to enter the regional parliament of the Silesian voivodship. One

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element that deterred many people in Silesia (as well as outside it) from supporting them was their overt anti-Polish stance, reflected in the strong anti-Polish statements made by their leader Jerzy Gorzelik.⁶ Of additional importance was the popularity of the German minority movement, which attracted many local people. Over time, the Silesian movement and its leaders became more and more moderate. At the same time, they shifted focus from sensational political issues to Silesian identity and culture, including the language issue, and presented the Movement for Silesian Autonomy as a reliable and responsible partner in the region. The Silesian movement and the Movement for Silesian Autonomy have started to gain popularity and voter support. In 2011, the Movement for the first time won seats in the regional parliament in the Silesian voivodship, and was invited by the biggest party in the region (the Civic Platform) to form the regional government. Gorzelik became a vice-chairman of the regional government. Another sign of the Silesian movement’s strength was the growing number of people who declared Silesian “nationality” in the 2001 and 2011 censuses, outnumbering those who declared German nationality (not to be confused with German citizenship).⁷ Concomitantly, the German minority showed signs of crisis in the decreasing numbers of votes and members in parliament, and of persons declaring German nationality. With the rise of the Silesian movement, the question of Silesian as a regional language gained more importance, to the extent that the Polish parliament started to consider it. In 2010, a group of members of parliament proposed a law to recognize Silesian as a regional language. This proposal was rejected, but in April 2012 an even larger group of sixty-five mp s from several parties (not only from Silesia), headed by Marek Plura from the ruling Civic Platform, submitted a similar proposal. In May 2012, an organization named the Upper Silesian Council (Rada Górnośląska) was established with the aim of pressing for official recognition of Silesian as a regional language and for legal regulation of Silesians’ status as a nationality. A government representative expressed the opinion that “the proposal of law recognizing the Silesian language is not under threat” (Pustułka 2012; Gazeta Wyborcza 2012). However, the Silesian situation is not clear and the support of the government and parliament for it as a regional language is not certain. In September 2012, a parliamentary commission dealing with the proposal to grant Silesian the status of a regional language was reticent. The main opponent was the Ministry of Finance,

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which calculated that recognizing Silesian as a regional language would require a considerable amount of money (e.g., costs of school education, initial teacher training, financing of cultural institutions promoting Silesian, etc.), several times more than the amount earmarked for Kashubian, which was unaffordable given the financial squeeze at the time. Apart from the problem of status, Silesian also faces a problem of corpus.⁸ The above discussion on the Silesian ethnoregionalist (nationalist) movement concerned Upper Silesia, or the central western part of the Silesian voivodship. The people of the northern, eastern, and southeastern parts of the voivodship, which belonged to Poland before it disappeared at the end of the eighteenth century, have a strong all-Polish identity (which is to some extent anti-Silesian) and do not support the idea of Silesian autonomy and language.⁹ The same is true for the southern area, the Teschen Silesia; although local dialects seem to be equally vibrant as those in Upper Silesia, and Teschen Silesia shares a distant history with Upper Silesia, the local population does not share Upper Silesians’ conceptions about language practice and use. C ON C LUS I ON

The legal recognition of Kashubian, its advancement in the public sphere, and the attempts to gain the same recognition and advancement for Silesian are taking place in a context in which almost all Silesians and Kashubians have an almost complete command of standard Polish. The number of native speakers of these idioms is shrinking, as is their representation in the local/regional population. An additional element is the growing role of foreign languages, primarily English but also German, as a result of globalization and European integration. In the case of Kashubian, there has been a dramatic interruption in the intergenerational transmission of language, which has led to a lack of native speakers of Kashubian under age forty; its absolute absence in towns, not to mention the biggest cities in the region (Gdansk and Gdynia); and its low rate of use among people with at least a secondary school education. All relevant sociolinguistic research on Kashubian shows that a vast majority those who declare they have a command of it can express their thoughts and emotions better in standard Polish. Several years ago, Kashubian sociolinguist and activist Cezary Obracht-Prondzynski (2003)

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stated that there was a race between the growing status of Kashubian and the declining number of its speakers. That race is still going on. Such detailed sociolinguistic research on Silesian is lacking (one of the few studies is Sekula et al. 2012). Nevertheless, its vitality in terms of language use is stronger, although not strong enough to challenge the position of standard Polish in public life. This study of Kashubian and Silesian in the context of an evolving and changing Polish language regime demonstrates both the resilience and the fragility of the traditional nation-state model, especially when applied to state history in Poland. The contours of Polish state traditions and the Polish language regime are being reshaped by critical political junctures in Poland’s recent history.

NOTES

1 It is worth mentioning that the vast majority of the Polish population (more than 95 per cent) speaks only Polish (aside from foreign languages), for the most part only in its standard version. 2 For instance, Kashubian is not spoken in towns (Woźniakiewicz 2013) while Silesian is commonly spoken in urban centres in Upper Silesia, both by older and younger generations (Wyderka 2003; 2010; 2012). 3 According to my observations, both Kashubian and Silesian activists in their intracommunity discussions on “serious” issues almost always use (standard) Polish. 4 A special phenomenon was the so-called Józef Kozdon movement – a group that mostly consisted of members of the local population with an anti-Polish political orientation that used standard Polish in its political activity (Nowak 1995). 5 Since 1999, sixteen voivodships or regions have enjoyed some autonomy, including regional parliaments elected directly by inhabitants, and governments elected by regional parliaments; there is also the institution of voivod or representative of the central government, similar to the French préfet. For examples of websites in and for Kashubian, see those of the Kashubian Pomeranian Association (www.z-kp.org; however, this page is mostly in Polish), Cassubia Dictionary (www.cassubiadictionary.com), and zmyk (http://zymk.net). There is also a portal containing links to Kashubian literature (www.kaszubia.com). 6 In one of his famous statements, Gorzelik declared that he did not feel Polish but Silesian and that he had never promised Poland anything, therefore he did not feel loyalty to it or like he was betraying it. This statement was broadly reported by Polish media (see, e.g., Kostyrko 2010; Krzyk 2010; Narbutt 2008).

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7 Altogether 809,000 defined their identity as Silesian: 362,000 named it their only identity, 415,000 shared it with Polish, and thirty-two shared it with German. The respective numbers of Germans were much lower: the overall number of those declaring any German identity was 110,000 (compared with 153,000 in 2002), but only 26,000 presented German as their exclusive identity and 23,000 as their dominant identity; 52,000 shared German and Polish and thirty-two German and Silesian identity (Główny Urząd Statystyczny 2012). 8 The disadvantages of Silesian, as in almost all similar cases, is its dialectal diversification and the lack of a common standard in spelling, vocabulary, etc. (see, e.g., www.gornyslonsk.republika.pl/slggodka.html; www.ponaszymu.eu). The problem Silesian regionalists face and often discuss is whether to form a unified, artificial, standard Silesian at the expense of living dialects or to preserve the latter ones (see, e.g., www.autonomia.pl). So far, local dialects are used in cultural production and in informal conversations, but in order to introduce Silesian to the official sphere and use it in writing it would need to have a unified form. 9 It can be seen, for instance, in the lack of support for the Movement for Silesian Autonomy in elections, in (unsuccessful) opposition in these areas against incorporation of them to the Silesian voivodship during the administrative reform in the 1990s, etc.

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Heffner, Krystian, and Barbara Solga. 2003. “The German Minority of Opole Silesia as a Minority of Social and Cultural Borderland.” In The Role of Ethnic Minorities in Border Regions, Region and Regionalism, vol. 1, no. 6, edited by Marek Koter and Krystian Heffner, 73–82. Lodz-Opole: University of Lodz and Silesian Institute of Opole, Silesian Institute Society. Heller, Monica. 2003. “Globalization, the New Economy, and the Commodification of Language and Identity.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (4): 473–92. Kostyrko, Jerzy, 2010. “Nie zgadzam się na autonomię!” [I don’t agree to autonomy!]. Gazeta Wyborcza (Katowice edition), 12 October. Krzyk, Józef, 2010. “Śląscy autonomiści poróżnili Platformę.” [Silesian autonomists caused a conflict within the Civic Platform party]. Gazeta Wyborcza (Katowice edition), 9 November. Łodziński, Sławomir. 2007. “Między grupą etniczną a społecznością posługującą się językiem regionalnym. Ewolucja statusu prawnego Kaszubów w polityce państwa w Polsce po 1989 roku.” [Between ethnic group and a community using a regional language: Evolution of the legal status of Kashubians in the policy of the state in Poland after 1989]. In Kim są Kaszubi? Nowe tendencje w badaniach społecznych [Who are Kashubians? New tendencies in social research], edited by Cezary C. Obracht-Prondzyński, 145–72. Gdańsk: Instytut Kaszubski. Mańczak, Witold. 2002. O pochodzeniu i dialekcie Kaszubów. [On the origins and dialect of Kashubians]. Gdańsk: Oficyna Czec. Mazurek, Monika. 2010. Język, Przestrzeń, Pochodzenie: Analiza tożsamości kaszubskiej. [Language, territory, origins: Analysis of Kashubian identity]. Gdańsk: Instytut Kaszubski. Narbutt, Maja, 2008. “Zegarek z napędem autonomicznym.” [Clock with autonomous driver]. Rzeczpospolita, 24 May. Nowak, Krzysztof. 1995. “Ruch kożdoniowski na Śląsku Cieszyńskim.” [The Jozef Kozdon movement in Teschen Silesian]. In Regionalizm a separatyzm – historia i współczesność: Śląsk na tle innych regionów [Regionalism and separatism: History and present day], edited by Maria Wanda Wanatowicz, 26–45. Katowice: Wydawnictwa u . Obracht-Prondzyński, Cezary C. 2003. “Język w systemie wartości Kaszubów / The Language in the Value System of the Kashubians.” In Języki mniejszości i języki regionalne, edited by Elzbieta Wrocławska and Jadwiga Zieniukowa, 237–46. Warszawa: Towarzystwo Naukowe Warszawskie i Instytut Slawistyki Polska Akademia Nauk. –, ed. 2007a. Kim są Kaszubi? Nowe tendencje w badaniach społecznych. [Who are Kashubians? New tendencies in social research]. Gdańsk: Instytut Kaszubski. –, ed. 2007b. Problemy i wyzwania edukacji międzykulturowej: Doświadczenia polskie i niemieckie / Probleme und Herausforderungen der interkulturellen Bildung: Deutsche und polnische Erfahrungen. [Problems and challenges of intercultural education]. Gdańsk-Wieżyca: Instytut Kasubski, Kaszubski Uniwersytet Ludowy.

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Pustułka, Agata. 2012. “Język śląski w Sejmie: Ruch Palikota za , sld za , po się łamie.” [Silesian in the parliament: Palikot movement in favour, left democratic alliance in favour, civic platform hesitates]. Dziennik Zachodni, 28 March. Rykiel, Zbigniew. 1995. “The Cultural Split of Upper Silesia.” In Social and Political Aspects: Region and Regionalism, edited by Marek Koter, 287–95. Opole-Lodz: University of Lodz, Silesian Institute in Opole. Sekuła, Anna. 2010. “Kultury pamięci Górnoślązaków.” [Cultures of memory of upper Silesians]. In Pamięć, przestrzeń, tożsamość [Memory, territory, identity], edited by Słavomir Kapralski, 119–42. Warszawa: Scholar. Sekuła, Anna, Bohdan Jałowiecki, Piotr Majewski, and Waldemar Żelazny. 2012. Być narodem? Ślązacy o Śląsku. [To be a nation? Silesians speak on Silesia]. Warszawa: Scholar. Siwek, Tadeusz. 1997. “Specyfika tożsamości etnicznej na Zaolziu.” [Specificity of ethnic identity in Zaolzie]. Studia Etnologiczne i Antropologiczne (1): 11–15. Woźniakiewicz, Joanna. 2013. Języki kaszubski i friulijski, zagrożenia i szanse: Porównanie stopnia zaawansowania procesów odchodzenia od języka. [Kashubian and Friulan languages, threats and chances: Comparison of degrees of processes of language shift]. Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, Zrzeszenie Kaszubsko-Pomorskie. Wyderka, Boguslaw. 2003. “Śląsk jako region językowy.” [Silesia as a linguistic region]. In Języki mniejszości i języki regionalne [Minority and regional languages], edited by Elzbieta Wrocławska and Jadwiga Zieniukowa, 501–8. Warszawa: Towarzystwo Naukowe Warszawskie i Instytut Slawistyki Polska Akademia Nauk. – 2010. “O języku śląskim.” [On the Silesian language]. In Studia Dialektologiczne iv , edited by Halina Kurek, Anna Tyrpa, and Jadwiga Wronicz, 87–92. Kraków. – 2011. “Opinia o poselskim projekcie Ustawy o zmianie ustawy o mniejszościach narodowych i etnicznych oraz o języku regionalnym przygotowana na zlecenie Biura Analiz Sejmowych.” [Opinion on the parliamentary project of the law on the change of the law on national and ethnic minorities and the regional language]. Prepared for the Bureau of Parliamentary Analyses. – 2012. “Emancypacja dialektów.” [Emancipation of dialects]. Z Polskich Studiów Slawistycznych. Series 12, 203–39. Językoznawstwo, Warsaw.

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5 Language Policies, Globalization, and Global English: Bringing the State Back In PE TE R I V E S

Political scientists concerned with nation-building, nationalism, constructions of identity, and citizenship often touch on issues of language and language policy, but the few who address language politics in the global context tend to ignore the role of states and state policies (e.g., Archibugi 2008; De Swaan 2001). Political science has contributed little to the overly dichotomous debates about “global English,” which is often viewed as either an inevitable and beneficial consequence of globalization or part and parcel of cultural imperialism (see Ives 2010; 2006). For political theorists engaged with liberal multiculturalism, language plays a key role (e.g., Kymlicka and Patten 2003; Kymlicka 2001; Taylor 1994). However, language issues are either less salient (Kymlicka 2007) or overly abstract when considered above the level of the nation-state (e.g., Archibugi 2008; Van Parijs 2010; see Ives 2006, 2010).¹ Given that liberal approaches dominate political theory, it is detrimental that, as Will Kymlicka and François Grin (2003, 8) note, “language turns out to be rather embarrassing for liberals [and] cannot easily be accommodated within the standard framework that liberals adopt for dealing with diversity.” As many of the other contributors in this volume attest, nuanced analyses of linguistic regimes present complex sets of pressures, conditions, limitations, and obstacles within policy-making processes. They also highlight contradictions and unintended consequences of policy implementation that affect language usage. While such research often considers questions of “globalization” (however we define this over-worked concept), the methodological focus is usually on the nation-state as the unit of analysis.² Interestingly enough, key debates that rage outside of political science among World Englishes (we ) or varieties of English, English as a lingua

franca (elf ), and critical applied linguistics involve power relationships among global English(es) and relations with other languages. They offer rich resources and insights for analyzing the impact of globalization on contemporary language politics. However, I will argue that they proceed in a manner that obscures state activity, a concern to which political scientists should be able to contribute. Nevertheless, these debates provide an invaluable entrance into influences and relations involved in the global spread of English. In his influential framework of we , Braj Kachru (2005, 18–19) distinguishes “norm-providing” from “norm-dependent” countries. For Kachru, this distinction overlaps with his concentric circle model of “inner” (e.g., England, the United States, Australia), “outer” (e.g., India, Singapore, the Philippines), and “expanding circles” (e.g., China, Indonesia). In the inner circle, English is dominant and a native language of a majority of the population; in the outer circle, it has an institutionalized or official role; and in the expanding circle, it is very important but largely as a “foreign language” (Kachru 2005, 13–16). Kachru sees the speakers in the expanding circle as norm dependent, and those in the inner and outer circles as norm providing, but offers little analysis or space for the crucial questions concerning various state activity (e.g., education policy, immigration laws, citizenship requirements) within this framework. Moreover, while Alistair Pennycook (2006, 105–12) criticizes Kachru’s general approach for remaining mired in the straightjacket of “the paradigm of an emerging national standard,” his assessment leads him away from language policy and into questions of language ideology. In this way, he too neglects the continued role of states’ language policies. In this chapter, I will argue that the concept of “normative grammar” as Antonio Gramsci (see Ives 2004, 40–52; 2010, 528–30) develops it provides a key theoretical tool in these debates as well as one way to construct bridges across disciplinary boundaries. Gramsci’s normative grammar allows us to theorize the power relationships that Pennycook finds wanting in Kachru’s approach, but retains a focus on language policies and states’ continued role in a manner that Pennycook and other critical applied linguists influenced by post-structuralism obscure. In order to assess the impact of global English on nation-state language regimes, we need a conceptual approach that can capture the subtlety of the myriad of ways in which English is promoted and enforced, especially by state policies, in addition to how it is perhaps resisted, co-opted, or transformed.

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T HE A B S E N C E O F L A N G U A G E I N G LO B A LI ZATION DE BATE S

Given the general acceptance that language standardization played an important role in the formation of the modern nation-state, it is surprising how marginal questions of language and the spread of global English are in the massive literature on globalization and the examination of the nation-state and its demise, role, and transformation that have dominated political science in the last decades.³ Benedict Anderson’s (1991) notion of “imagined communities” had an enormous influence from the 1990s onward. This includes his analysis of the specific conception of national, vernacular, and standard languages at the heart of the distinctive features of the rise of the modern nation-state (see also Grillo 1989; Weber 1976). Anderson argues that differing conceptions of, and relations to, language are central in distinguishing dynastic and religious ways to imagine community from modern national constructions. And yet current debates concerning the impact of globalization (and all the various phenomena that it conjures up, such as capital flows, world markets, transnational production processes, immigration, transportation, and communication technologies) on the form, power, and future of the nation-state rarely raise questions about the impact of global English or other linguistic changes.⁴ If such debates address language at all, they do so rather superficially as confirmation of more general arguments about globalization (see Ives 2010, 516–23). There has been surprisingly little follow-through on Anderson’s fundamental point that the very conceptualization of political community was altered historically with the projects of modern nationalisms in which national, standard languages were central.⁵ What then is the impact of the rise of global English and the technologies that accompany it, from the Internet to different ways of mapping and identity and community formation in the twenty-first century? Arguably, these accompanying developments are central features in much current research, but my broad contention is that the historical link between languages and states is often obscured in such work. One of Anderson’s arguments is that language became central to the imagining of community as a homogenous sense of anonymous and extrapersonal connectedness within what Walter Benjamin describes as “empty time” (Benjamin 1968, 260–4). Anderson distinguishes this from previous imaginings of community along dynastic and religious lines. It is not that

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language was insignificant to these other forms of community, but rather that the standardization of vernacular languages conceived of as “mother tongues” and promoted through mandatory education systems and state policies was a prerequisite of the newspaper, the map, and the mobilization of the printing press that together form this nationalistic imagining of community (Anderson 1991). Crucial here is the distinction between standard languages as merely vehicles for communication and as integrally related to identity, perceiving the world, and marking boundaries. As Jean Laponce (2005, 22) notes, language is not only about communication but also about exclusion.⁶ That global English is a phenomenon not due to any increase in mother tongue English speakers but due to the massive increase in non-native English users would seem to be central to the question of the future of the nation-state and its mobilization of citizenship. Of course, this is a complex situation, as English has some sort of official status in many of the countries that account for its massive usage as a non-native language (Crystal 2003, 59–71). As many of the case studies on language policy of specific nation-states show, states are far from having carte blanche in terms of their language policies (e.g., see the chapters in this volume by Walsh, Szul, Turgeon and Gagnon, Dupré, and Harguindéguy and Itçaina). They face many constraints, from the existence of linguistic minorities, some with fierce commitments to their mother tongues, to language being reawakened as a vehicle of resistance and non-national identity, to the non-existence of a clear obvious standard language, to questions of education, geography, and the like. Indeed, much important work connects the spread of English to more general economic questions of the commodification of language. As Monica Heller (2011, 37) writes, “Language is involved in [the] process of organizing unequal relations of production and consumption in several ways. It is … central to the processes of categorization that are mobilized to organize and legitimize inequality.” W OR LD E N GLI S H ES A N D EN G LI SH A S A LI N GUA FRANCA

In disciplines other than political science, especially applied linguistics, education, literary criticism, and social linguistics, there have been vociferous debates concerning the advent of global English since the middle of the twentieth century. Questions of globalization and the nation-state

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arise in very different ways in such discussions (often in ways that political scientists feel unsatisfied with in terms of how power is understood). Consider for example the debate between the elf and the we schools. The former emphasizes the distinct nature of the type of English used as a lingua franca across community boundaries by non-native speakers (and works to foster its development).⁷ The latter, especially Kachru and his followers, emphasizes the variations of Englishes as creations of hybridity and the influence of other languages that incorporate differing values and cultural elements as they form new languages or forms of English. Both perspectives tend to assume, rather than explore or explicate, different notions of how language is related to community and identity. They also say little about what the role of the state is or should be in such processes. I trace elf ’s conception of language back through the tradition of John Locke that sees language as primarily an instrument of communication. Kachru’s perspective draws on several traditions but can be associated with German Romanticism’s attachment between language and identity.⁸ Moreover, elf and we have disparate implications for what I call the “politics of language” or questions of how power and differentials of power (marginalization, social inequality, etc.) are enacted through language. Nevertheless, they do raise political questions not only about the advent of global English but also about the role of language in our current historical conjuncture – which I call globalization for lack of a better term – that the more state-centred approaches of political science often evade. Thus, we might understand such debates between elf and we (as well as other debates in education, literary studies, and other areas)⁹ concerning language above or across the nation-state level of analysis. A broader project, beyond the scope of the current chapter, is to bring together aspects of these differing literatures, especially how language can be addressed within questions of globalization and the nation-state. I will give just one small specific example of what I am pointing to with my distinction between the approaches common within political science and those in other disciplines.¹⁰ William Safran (2005, 5, emphasis mine) states, in his introduction to Language, Ethnic Identity and the State, “the vast majority of states are formally unilingual but contain more than one language community” and then lists seventeen of the anomalies, those countries that are formally multilingual. This is quite a different typology and provides quite a different image, although one no less true or accurate, from David Crystal’s (2003, 66) explanation for the spread of

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English globally by listing the seventy-five states in which, according to him, English has a “special place” as either an official language or “plays an important role in the community” as “part of the nation’s recent or present identity.” Crystal uses this list to estimate that in 2001 there were 329 million native English speakers and 430 million non-native English speakers in the world. Indeed, he invokes Kachru’s influential concentric circles model distinguishing the inner, outer, and expanding circles to help quantify and describe the nature and extent of global English. The inner circle is comprised not of Safran’s formally unilingual states, but of countries where English is dominant (Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, etc.), and the outer circle of countries where it is not the majority language but has significant institutionalized roles, e.g., India, Malawi, Singapore. The expanding circle is defined vaguely as places where English is still a “foreign language” without a colonial history or the like, and where significant numbers of people are learning and using it in everincreasing domains. In this model, nation-states are still the containers for languages, but from the we research (rather than Crystal’s specific project of quantifying and describing global English) it is the variations and types of a given language, English, that are the object of research. Kachru’s major use of this typology is to single out the outer circle as a zone that, while not traditionally associated with English, is still a norm-providing source of Englishes that needs to be distinguished from the norm-dependent areas of the expanding circle. Kachru (e.g., 2005, 24) emphasizes that his approach pluralizes the sources of English and takes the defining authority of language away from the commonly assumed sources of “English-speaking countries” (not exactly Safran’s “formally unilingual” but close) and provides some legitimacy to, for example, Asian Englishes. Questions of language policy and the state are not entirely absent from Kachru’s or the we school’s research, but they play at best a tertiary role as context or one of many factors that influence how English is adapted and adopted in various places where it absorbs elements of other languages and “non-English” culture and values.¹¹ C HA LLE NGI NG M O N O LI T H I C EN G LI SH O R O BSCURING THE POWE R OF L A NGUA GE ST R U CT U R ES?

Despite (or perhaps because of ) Kachru’s emphasis that we pluralizes and decentres conceptions of English (and languages in general), Penny-

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cook (2006, 104) insists that Kachru and his followers fail to adequately challenge “the notion of monolithic English emanating from the central Anglo-institutions of global hegemony.” Just pluralizing Englishes and adding a degree of legitimacy to their differing forms does not, according to Pennycook, provide a suitable epistemological or ontological conception of language but instead re-instantiates the myth of English (or any language) as an objectified, pre-constituted, abstract system with a life of its own that people merely use. He argues, “by focusing centrally on the development of new national Englishes, the World Englishes approach reproduces precisely those linguistic paradigms that fell into the trap of believing the nationalist dream” (Pennycook 2006, 105).¹² Pennycook is no elf proponent either. In an effort to manoeuvre around debates about the global spread of English, especially among the linguistic imperialism, we , and elf camps, he deconstructs the very object, structure, and stability of the entity labelled English, or of the identity of any particular language. He argues that all sides of these wide-ranging debates “remain stuck within twentieth-century frameworks of language and nations” (Pennycook 2010, 78). Drawing on post-colonial and post-structuralist theory,¹³ Pennycook (2010, 80) argues that we must develop “alternative epistemologies” to challenge the way European colonialism has established an ideology of language rooted in nation, power, and control. He concludes, “the question that has started to emerge, then, is whether these old categorizations of language – varieties, code-switching, bilingualism, mother tongue, multilingualism and borrowing – as well as the identities that are assumed along lines of language, location, ethnicity and culture really work anymore” (Pennycook 2010, 83). I think Pennycook is correct in that we need to critically evaluate all such concepts, including the very notion of a (standard or standardized) language, but there is an irony that his general argument challenging the existence of such a language is not terribly new and the historical version of his position has been soundly criticized. His approach bears some striking similarities to Karl Vossler’s 1925 argument that “the first and most obvious assumption of the science of language is that there is a language. But this is precisely what is uncertain … To begin with, there is actually no language, but only speech: my speech, your speech, our speech now and here, today and yesterday” (Vossler 1932, 7). Vossler then invokes the metaphors of weather and climate to explain the relationship between speech

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and language. Where speech is like weather, it is an actually existing set of phenomena; where language is like climate, it is a rough abstraction and generalization of weather patterns that emphasizes their consistency (Vossler 1932, 15). As Valentin Vološinov argues, this conceptualization of language as purely an abstraction of speech acts – or “local practices” to use Pennycook’s terminology – is prone to “individual subjectivism” and is incapable of grasping how, as Vološinov puts it, the “word is a two sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant” (Vološinov 1986, 86; see also Ives 2004b, 67–72). This is because, according to Vološinov, it fails to take into account the element of truth in the tradition that it opposes such as Saussurean structuralism. Vološinov agrees with the criticisms Vossler and other exemplars of the individual subjectivist tradition launch against the abstract objectivism that was gaining dominance within linguistics in the early decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, Pennycook (2010, 10) cites him on just this point. But what Pennycook fails to appreciate is that Vološinov also incorporates the abstract objectivist critique of those like Vossler, to which Pennycook also falls prey. In other words, the severe circumscription of framing language as solely local practice also obscures the power relationships involved in those local practices that operate through the stability of the language structure. This metaphor of speech/language as weather/climate is also telling for this investigation of how to conceive of state activity concerning the spread of English internationally. Not only does it mis-characterize questions of local speech practices as natural phenomena like weather (a position Pennycook would clearly object to as well), but it also shows conceptually how no institution or agency like a state could influence language (as in climate) other than just modifying local speech acts (an image that Pennycook’s position supports). As Vološinov understands and, as I will illustrate below, Gramsci also theorizes, spontaneous speech acts or local language practices cannot so easily be separated from language structures or standardized languages. Thus, in addition to making it impossible to conceptualize how power operates through languages as standardized stable systems, Pennycook’s approach separates local language practices from the structural relations of which they are necessarily a part. Political scientists’ analysis of language policy at the level of individual states indicates that those policies are directed at both the structural level (or language, or, to follow the metaphor, climate) and the individual level of speech practices, simultaneously.¹⁴ States adopt one or more official languages, determine

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the legal status of other languages, and make policies that bear directly on what constitutes the “correct” form of a given language – whether the Académie française or less indirect and informal mechanisms such as language qualifications for teachers, determining educational curricula, or deciding which governmental services are provided in which language[s]. When states use overt coercion to interfere with local language practices, whether it is proscribing the use of Kurdish in Turkey, enforcing French language signage on par with English in Quebec, or using Mexican accents to determine whether to suspect individuals of being illegal aliens in Arizona, they do so within the structurally defined language. It is difficult to see how Pennycook’s focus solely on local practices can analyze and resist operations of state power whose performances are buttressed by state policies, resources, and coercive force. As I will argue below, to think that the politics of dominant languages can be challenged solely by undermining the veracity of stable linguistic structures is to argue, to use Gramsci’s concepts, that spontaneous grammar exists without normative grammar. This is not the place to offer a full response to and critique of Pennycook, but his position is a useful one that interrogates the intricacies of a more general trend toward conceptions like local practices, emphases on local contexts of globalization, and critiques of the implicit structuralism of much research on language and politics. Influential scholars like Heller (2011) – while different in many respects from Pennycook and certainly not de-emphasizing the role of states and language policy – are also moving toward concepts of local practice and a primary focus on ethnography. My concern with this general trend, most apparent in Pennycook, is that state activities, including language and associated policies, are difficult to appreciate and analyze without a sense of structure and system that Pennycook and others reject. As Suresh Canagarajah (2005, xx) summarizes, “the biggest shift under the influence of globalization discourse is that the nation-state (the basic unit of language planning hitherto) is now of reduced relevance for such purposes.” While there is, of course, some truth in this, it too often confuses and conflates a methodological shift that is less sensitive to the impact of the state on language usage with an empirical claim about the changing power of the state vis-à-vis “the global” (however that is articulated, even in work like Canagarajah and Pennycook’s that is critical of the global in favour of the local). These trends are particularly problematic when discourses of social cohesion are on the rise and specifically tied to questions of language (see Piller and

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Takahashi 2011) – for example, when the United Kingdom is increasing its immigration policies’ English knowledge requirements; when the US Congress more frequently addresses the option to make English the country’s official language; and when controversial immigration legislation in Arizona (Bill 1070) makes proficiency in and accent of English by law an index of suspicion of illegality (Riccardi 2010; Leeman 2012).¹⁵ Discussions of the Anglosphere are also on the rise in conservative discourse (Bennet 2004). Pennycook’s attempt to challenge the legacy of European colonialism on epistemological terms may do little to prevent the state from being mobilized in ways that further reinforce boundaries of language with those of identity and culture.¹⁶ Nevertheless, I am sympathetic to his interest in challenging assumptions that tie mother tongue monolingualism to privileging authenticity and obscuring the creative use of language, including mixings, hybridity, and the like. But if this critique comes at the cost of losing a critical purchase on state language policy, it risks being selfdefeating. This is where Gramsci and his specific concept of normative grammar can be useful.¹⁷ T HE GR A MMA R O F P O WER R EL AT I O N S: B R I N GING THE STATE BACK IN

Gramsci is most known for his conceptualization of hegemony, often invoked in discussions of language politics and regimes and sometimes with explicit reference to him. It is a little more rare for such invocations to show any awareness of Gramsci’s own training as a linguist at the University of Turin, his life-long interest in Italian language politics, or the argument made most thoroughly by Franco Lo Piparo that the or a major influence of his development of hegemony was from Italian and European linguistics using the concept (Lo Piparo 1979, 2010; see also Ives 2004). The connection is clearly rooted in the context of Italian history. When Italy was politically unified in 1861, there was a literary (written) Italian known by a small fraction of the elite and spoken dialects that were incommunicable from south to north throughout the peninsula, and one of the major components of Massimo d’Azeglio’s call that “Italy is a fact, now we need to make Italians” was to create a national standard language. The famous novelist Alessandro Manzoni, who had been appointed to the government commission tasked with creating and diffusing a standard language, provided the initial strategy. Manzoni took spoken, middle-class Florentine as the model, created grammars and textbooks from it, and drew all school-

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teachers from the Tuscan region where they spoke a similar dialect. Gramsci follows the criticism of such a plan put forth by the linguist G.I. Ascoli, arguing that it would impose a foreign language on the majority of Italians that was unrelated to their history, culture, or ways of seeing the world. Gramsci compares this to the project of Esperanto, and Lo Piparo (1979) argues that this historical context and concern was the important crucible for Gramsci’s major political conceptions. I will leave the concept of hegemony aside in this chapter and focus on a much less well known, although related, set of writings within Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, those on grammar, specifically the pair of concepts “normative grammar” and “immanent” or “spontaneous grammar.”¹⁸ In Gramsci’s typical fashion of adopting and then subverting standard concepts, he develops normative grammar in order to reveal the necessarily political nature of language standardization. His argument here shares much with Pennycook’s analysis of the naturalization of standard languages discussed above. Where traditionally the conception of normative grammar, dating back at least to the Port Royal Grammar of 1660, lays out the rules for how a language should be used, whether based on some recourse to logic, tradition, or authority, Gramsci (1985, 181) notes, “It is obvious that someone who writes a normative grammar cannot ignore the history of the language of which he wishes to propose an ‘exemplary phase’ as the ‘only’ one worthy to become … the ‘common’ language a nation in competition and conflict with other ‘phases’ or types or schemes that already exist.” So as opposed to many others who justify the authority of normative grammar through recourse to logic, reason, or tradition, for Gramsci the creation of such a grammar is always a political choice, a political project. But he provides two other major contributions to this concept that make it especially useful to the type of critique Pennycook launches but that save it from the pitfalls he beckons. The first is that Gramsci expands the formal notion of normative grammar. Where the types of policies associated with Manzoni’s plan in terms of government funding for and guiding of the creation of dictionaries and grammars and most importantly the state-run, mandatory school system are central aspects of normative grammar, Gramsci also includes the more informal, daily interactions among language speakers and users. Thus he defines normative grammar to include processes “made up of reciprocal monitoring, reciprocal teaching and reciprocal ‘censorship’ expressed in such questions as ‘What did you mean to say?’, ‘What do you mean?’, ‘Make

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yourself clearer’, etc., and in mimicry and teasing. This whole complex of actions and reactions come together to create grammatical conformism, to establish ‘norms’ or judgements of correctness or incorrectness” (Gramsci 1985, 180). Here we see the power relationships between speakers are embedded in the very definition of normative grammar, and it is not only large government policy and structures but also the daily interactions among people that create and enforce norms of speaking. In other words, Gramsci addresses Pennycook’s (2010, 29, 124) repeated insistence on the need for “looking at practices as meso-political action” to overcome any dichotomy between micro- and macro-analysis. But Gramsci’s normative grammar succeeds in a similar critique of the predominance of macro-analysis, without sacrificing the systemic power relations especially evident in state activities. In this sense, Gramsci’s critique of the dichotomy between micro- and macro-analysis has echoes in Heller (2011, 34, 40), although his normative grammar incorporates the interactions of power relations involving various degrees of coercion and consent of language users. While I do not want to accuse Pennycook of failing to see local language practices as inherently political; his position makes it difficult to connect those power relations to the larger structural processes of which he is critical. Moreover, a focus on local, fluid, and hybrid language practices against the structural or even structuralist account is inherent in Canagarajah’s (2007, 87–98, emphasis added) rather problematic conclusion that “the hegemonic thrust of global English derives from the dominant assumptions of linguistics, informed by the modernist philosophical movement and intellectual culture in which they developed.” Whereas Gramsci is aware that language hegemony derives not from linguists, however powerful they may be, but from a much broader range of resources for constructing consensus that can never be fully dissociated from the coercive capacities of the state. The second crucial point that Gramsci adds is in the way he distinguishes (but does not statically oppose) normative grammar from immanent or spontaneous grammar. Prior to introducing normative grammar, he notes, “there is the grammar ‘immanent’ in language itself, by which one speaks ‘according to grammar’ without knowing it” and then also refers to this as spontaneous grammar (Gramsci 1985, 180). Earlier in the Prison Notebooks, he argues that “‘pure’ spontaneity does not exist in history” but that spontaneity is the result of “conscious leadership” having been forgotten,

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having left “no reliable document,” and thus he notes that it is associated with subaltern classes (Gramsci 1971, 196). Together with his discussion of the dialectical relationships between spontaneous and normative grammars, it becomes clear that a normative grammar (or fragments of various normative grammars) can become internalized, their imposition or the moment of normativity having been forgotten or obscured, and so can be experienced as if they were spontaneous.¹⁹ Likewise, normative grammars themselves are created through the conscious process of organizing and making explicit patterns of a single spontaneous grammar or multiple spontaneous grammars. This exploration led Gramsci to quite a different conclusion about language politics than his earlier pre-prison journalism where he addressed such issues in 1918, to the position that the creation of a normative grammar and along with it a national standard language can be a progressive process that helps to include subaltern classes and decrease marginalization. But it can also be a regressive strategy of imposition that serves to reinforce the power dynamics among its users (Ives 2010, 523–8). It all depends on the relationships between the normative grammar proposed and the spontaneous grammars involved. If, as was the case for Manzoni’s strategy, a single spontaneous grammar, that of the Florentine dialect, is taken as the normative one, and the other Italian dialects are suppressed or even expected to work in a situation of diglossia but where the national standard is clearly the language of prestige and power, then there is a regressive form of hegemony whereby the ways of understanding the world embedded in the dialects are further fragmented and demoted. On the other hand, if the normative grammar is to be that of a truly “popular” national language, then its creation will be the incorporation of various spontaneous grammars, perhaps akin to current discussions of hybridity and creative mixing with which Pennycook is so enamoured. However, rather than the unbridled celebration of creativity (which in Pennycook’s analyses seems to occur in specific fields like hip hop, graffiti, and street culture), in Gramsci’s analysis the questions of power relationship and the role of the state are always kept at the forefront because the issue of the normativity that allows language to function and communication to occur retains a central role.²⁰ Key here is that Gramsci does not just laud spontaneous grammar and criticize normative grammar. On the contrary, although he is critical of some strategies that create and impose normative grammar, in the Italian context he argues that some normative grammar for a truly popular, national language was necessary.

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Gramsci (1985, 182) writes, “it is rational to collaborate practically and willingly to welcome everything that may serve to create a common national language, the non-existence of which creates friction particularly in the popular masses.” Thus, spontaneity has severe limitations and adverse political consequences, according to Gramsci.²¹ It is this suspicion of the limitations of spontaneity for addressing questions of marginalization, inequality and power differentials that I argue should lead us to be careful about celebrating decentred language practices as “an example of globalization from below” (Canagarajah 2005, xxix). C ON C LUS I ON

For Gramsci, normative grammars – both those he criticizes, like Manzoni’s, and those he advocates – involve the state and its policies concerning education, official, and national languages in which it provides services and interaction, immigration policies, citizenship requirements, and the like. But it is not restricted to them. As I note above, normative grammar also involves localized and informal processes – what Pennycook calls local practice. To wish that spontaneous grammar was all that structures languages is to misunderstand not just the impact of the state and language standardization but also the inherent political nature of language conformity. Gramsci’s conception of normative grammar requires that we understand the power dynamics involved in how language practices influence one another and then take a more serious look at the impact of language policy and states’ activities. From this perspective, elf in situations with speakers from many different places with differing language repertoires can still be understood as having a normative grammar as opposed to the implication that the criteria of communication renders it transparent or a pure medium of communication not attached to particular cultures, values, or perspectives on the world. Similarly, as differing forms of English develop, the processes that create the types of conformity that give them prominence and make them functional can be placed within broader social dynamics. These dynamics need, of course, to address who is included, who is made to adapt, and how. While context is paramount in answering such questions, the vast majority of local language practices that make up the global spread of English are related to the dynamics of global capitalism and complex

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state responses, at times trying to shore up the regulation of citizens and immigrants, and at others attempting to train a globally competitive work force and yet also create cultural products with domestic and international consumer bases. The dynamics associated with global capitalism and various governmental responses are structured in ways not always readily visible from the level of local practice shorn of structural processes. In other words, Gramsci’s normative grammar insists that we focus on the types of power relationships often left out of much of the we literature’s more descriptive focus. Most significantly, Gramsci’s normative grammar accepts Pennycook’s critique that even Kachru’s pluralizing of languages does not go far enough in seeing the constructed nature of standard languages, but it does so without losing a critical purchase on the state along with education systems, immigration policies, and citizenship requirements as forces that are still active today. Combined with a richer vocabulary that Gramsci offers through his other major influential concepts such as subalternity, common sense, civil society, integral state, and passive revolution, I hope that Gramsci’s writings on normative and spontaneous grammar can be useful in addressing the types of broader political issues that political scientists are concerned with. I also hope that these issues can be brought to bear on the language issues raised by global capitalism in which nation-states remain crucial actors in language usage.

NOTES

1 Peter Kraus (2008) offers an interesting exception, although he considers the European Union. 2 For an insightful overview of some of the overlaps and gaps between discussions of globalization and language studies as well as approaches to global English see Selma K. Sonntag (2003, especially chapter 1). This book is comparative in organization (the local is defined by case studies of nation-states) but draws on interdisciplinary work as well, thus supporting my general observation here but pushing its boundaries. Sonntag’s (2009; 2005) more recent work goes further in crossing the boundaries of nation-states (but not de-emphasizing their significance) and analyzing globalization by drawing on literature from within and beyond political science. 3 I discuss some examples in Ives (2010), including the work of David Held, Mary Kaldor, and ironically enough Jürgen Habermas.

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4 I am not saying here that I am in complete agreement with Anderson’s analysis. (For some significant critical assessments see Joseph 2004, 124; May 2012, 69–71; Makoni and Pennycook 2006, 7–8; and Desai 2008.) 5 Far from assuming that so-called globalization is antithetical and supersedes nationalism, my point here is that much of the literature calling forth “global civil society,” “global citizenship,” etc., coupled with an acceptance of Anderson’s general argument, would seem to require such a rethinking of new imaginings of community since Anderson’s characterization of modern nationalism would no longer fit. The key question of commodification of language products and skills is beyond the scope of the current essay but central to any question of globalization given the global capitalism is the underlying dynamic. Where the concept of immaterial labour following from the work of Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) is important here it remains an open question whether it is a suitable way to discuss linguistic processes. 6 Interestingly enough, Anderson downplays this exclusionary aspect of modern nationalisms defining the nation against the other of different nations, merely noting the sameness in which Greeks are Greek and English are English. This notion of identity being formed by the “constitutive outside” is central to those perspectives emanating from Jacques Derrida, especially the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985). 7 For a recent summary and defence of the elf position see Dewey and Jenkins (2010) and Meierkord (2004). 8 I address these two traditions of approaching language and critiqued the separation by both of communicative versus symbolic dimensions of language elsewhere (Ives 2015). 9 The more general and politicized debate is between advocates of global English who see it as a collective resource that benefits all (e.g., Van Parijs 2010; Archibugi 2008) and those who see it as an extension of political, economic, and military imperialism (e.g., Phillipson 1992) or a severe threat to linguistic diversity; for a dual critique of both positions see Ives (2006). 10 For this chapter, this one example will have to stand in for a larger documentation of this point. 11 In many ways, Kachru’s approach has similarities with that of the late nineteenth century Italian linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, who is important here due to his significant influence on Gramsci, to be discussed below. 12 Pennycook then makes an odd nod toward Anderson’s thesis, discussed above, ignoring his repeated emphasis that by “imagined” he does not mean mythical, which is exactly the discourse that Pennycook is mobilizing. 13 To be fair, Pennycook (2010, 122–6) does not fully endorse post-structuralism since he presents it as overly abstract and instead invokes the more prosaic discourse of new ethnological and anthropological literatures focusing on local practice. Nevertheless, his critique of we and the notion that languages are entities borrows heavily from what is usually understood as post-structuralism.

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14 My thanks to Selma K. Sonntag for helping me formulate this more clearly and not fall into a different version of this separation that I am criticizing. 15 Political scientists will also be quick to note that this state law’s constitutionality is being challenged at the federal level, adding additional layers to questions of what constitutes “local.” I thank Sonntag for this point. 16 Part of my concern is the tacit alignment between the implications of Pennycook’s position and the neutralization of the politics of language in discussions of global English by scholars like Abram De Swan, Philippe Van Parijs, and Daniele Archibugi that I critique elsewhere (see Ives 2006; 2010). 17 In this sense, I’m trying to expand various uses and discussions of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony with a wider appreciation of his theoretical framework and other key concepts. This move in this direction has also been taken by Sonntag’s (2009, 12) invocation of Gramsci’s (1979, 248) “war of position.” 18 Franco Lo Piparo makes the astute suggestion that this discussion which is located in Gramsci’s last prison notebook can actually be read as his final version of the dynamic at the center of much of his Prison Notebooks where he uses the concept hegemony. 19 This point is very important in questioning Canagarajah’s (2007, 91) celebration of communication among non-native speakers of English where “the speakers are able to monitor each other’s language proficiency to determine mutually the appropriate grammar, phonology, lexical range, and pragmatic conventions that would ensure intelligibility” as if power differentials and the “cultural capital” or prestige among these speakers did not temper the degree of mutuality involved. It is as if we are back to assuming a Habermasian “ideal speech situation.” 20 One underlying and underdeveloped line of argument here is how the widespread influence of Pierre Bourdieu’s approach shares some similarities with Gramsci’s approach but also some important differences. Bourdieu is an important influence not only on Pennycook and Heller, but also many others in the field including Stephen May (2012). For the beginning of an interesting comparison between Gramsci and Bourdieu see Friedman (2009) and my response (Ives 2009). Judith Butler’s (1997, 142) opposition between Bourdieu and Derrida on the question of speech and rupture is significant. For a very different assessment of Bourdieu and language see Grin, Sfreddo, and Vaillancourt (2010, 30–4). 21 See Green and Ives (2009) for a discussion of the detriments of spontaneity as a condition of subaltern classes.

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Bennet, James C. 2004. The Anglosphere Challenge. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. London: Routledge. Canagarajah, Suresh. 2005. “Introduction.” In Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice, edited by Suresh Canagarajah, xii–xxix. Mahwah, nj : Lawrence Erlbaum Association. – 2007. “The Ecology of Global English.” International Multilingual Research Journal 1 (2): 89–100. Crystal, David. 2003. English as a Global Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Swaan, Abram. 2001. Words of the World. Cambridge: Polity. Desai, Radhika. 2008. “The Inadvertence of Benedict Anderson.” Global Media and Communication 4: 183–200. Dewey, Martin, and Jennifer Jenkins. 2010. “English as Lingua Franca in the Global Context.” In Contending with Globalization in World Englishes, edited by Mukul Saxena and Tope Omoniyi, 72–92. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Friedman, P. Kerim. 2009. “Ethical Hegemony.” Rethinking Marxism 21 (3): 355–65. Gramsci, Antonio. 1985. Selections from Cultural Writings. Cambridge, ma : Harvard University Press. – 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Green, Marcus, and Peter Ives. 2009. “Subalternity and Language: Overcoming the Fragmentation of Common Sense.” Historical Materialism 17 (1): 3–30. Grillo, Ralph. 1989. Dominant Languages: Language and Hierarchy in Britain and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grin, François, Claudio Sfreddo, and François Vaillancourt. 2010. The Economics of the Multilingual Workplace. New York: Routledge. Heller, Monica. 2011. Paths to Post-nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ives, Peter. 2004. Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 2006. “‘Global English’: Linguistic Imperialism or Practical Lingua Franca?” Studies in Language and Capitalism 1: 121–41. Reprinted in Language and Politics, edited by John Earl Joseph, vol. 4. New York: Routledge, 2009. – 2009. “Prestige, Faith and Dialect.” Rethinking Marxism 21 (3): 366–74. – 2010. “Cosmopolitanism and Global English: Language Politics in Globalisation Debates.” Political Studies 58: 516–35. – 2015. “Language and Collective Identity.” In Language and Identity Politics, edited by Christina Späti. Oxford: Berghahn. Joseph, John Earl. 2004. Language and Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kachru, Braj. 2005. Asian Englishes: Beyond the Canon. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Kraus, Peter. 2008. A Union of Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kymlicka, Will. 2001. Politics in the Vernacular. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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– 2007. Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kymlicka, Will, and François Grin. 2003. “Introduction: Assessing the Politics of Diversity in Transition Countries.” In Nation-Building, Ethnicity and Language Politics in Transition Countries, edited by Farimah Daftary and François Grin, 1–28. Budapest: Local Government and Public Reform Initiative, Open Society Institute. Kymlicka, Will, and Alan Patten, eds. 2003. Language Rights and Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Social Strategy. London: Verso. Laponce, Jean. 1987. Languages and their Territories. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 2005. “Minority Languages and Globalization.” In Language, Ethnic Identity and the State, edited by William Safran and Jean Laponce, 15–24. New York: Routledge. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 1996. “Immaterial Labor.” In Radical Thought in Italy, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, 133–50. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Leeman, Jennifer. 2012. “Illegal Accents.” In Arizona Firestorm, edited by Otto Santa Ana and Celeste Bustamante, 145–66. Lanham, md : Rowman & Littlefield. Lo Piparo, Franco. 1979. Lingua Intellettuali Egemonia in Gramsci. Bari: Laterza. – 2010. “The Linguistic Roots of Gramsci’s Non-Marxism.” In Gramsci, Language and Translation, edited by Peter Ives and Rocco Lacorte, 19–28. Lanham, md : Lexington. May, Stephen. 2012. Language and Minority Rights: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Language. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Meierkord, Christiane. 2004. “Syntactic Variation in Interactions across International Englishes.” English World-Wide 25 (1): 109–32. Pennycook, Alistair. 2006. “The Myth of English as an International Language.” In Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages, edited by Sinfree Makoni and Alistair Pennycook, 90–115. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. – 2010. Language as Local Practice. London: Routledge. Phillipson, Robert. 1992. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Piller, Ingrid, and Kimie Takahashi. 2011. “Linguistic Diversity and Social Inclusion.” Introduction to special issue, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 14 (4): 371–81. Riccardi, Nicholas. 2010. “Police Guidelines Underscore Complexities of Arizona Immigration Law.” Los Angeles Times, 2 July. Safran, William. 2005. “Introduction.” In Language, Ethnic Identity and the State, edited by William Safran and Jean Laponce, 1–14. New York: Routledge. Sonntag, Selma K. 2003. The Local Politics of Global English. Lanham, md : Lexington.

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– 2005. “Appropriating Identity or Cultivating Capital? Global English in Offshoring Service Industries.” Anthropology of Work Review 26 (6): 13–20. – 2009. “Linguistic Globalization and the Call Center Industry: Imperialism, Hegemony or Cosmopolitanism?” Language Policy 8: 5–25. Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism, edited by Amy Gutman, 25–74. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Van Parjis, Philippe. 2010. Linguistic Justice for Europe and the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vološinov, Valentin N. 1986. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, ma : Harvard University Press. Vossler, Karl. 1932. The Spirit of Language in Civilization. London: Kegan Paul, Tench Trubner. Weber, Eugene. 1976. Peasant into Frenchmen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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6 Bureaucratic Language Regimes in Multilingual States: Comparing Belgium and Canada¹ LU C TU R GEO N AND AL AIN - G. GAG NO N

In this chapter, we analyze the bureaucratic language regimes of two economically advanced federal states, Belgium and Canada, in which language has become over time the dominant cultural marker and dividing line. We argue that variations in regimes can be explained by differences in the configuration of two variables: the (evolving) representation of the political community and how it has been channelled through each country’s policy-making process. In the first section, we present an overview of the different bureaucratic language regimes adopted by the two federal countries, contrasting what we refer to as the Belgian “parity-unilingual” and the Canadian “individual-bilingual” regimes. In the second section, we present a theoretical framework that stresses the importance of the representation of a country’s political community and institutional structure in the creation of coalitions able to implement their preferred policy choice. In the final section, we use this framework to explain the adoption of different bureaucratic language regimes in Belgium and Canada. Besides policy documents and the secondary literature on the two countries, we draw on twenty-one interviews conducted with policy-makers, interest group leaders, and politicians in both countries. R E P R E S E N TAT I VE B U R E A U CR A CY I N MU LT ILINGUAL STATE S: C OMPA R I N G BELG I U M A N D CA N A D A

In both Belgium and Canada, the management of interlinguistic relations has been central to the politics of the post-war period (McRae 1986). Each country has adopted different types of bureaucratic language regimes to

ensure a fair representation of its main linguistic communities in the federal public administration.² We document three main factors that influence hiring practices and bureaucrats’ day-to-day working environment: the existence (or not) of hiring quotas; the linguistic prerequisites for civil servants, especially at the senior level;³ and the extent to which those requirements have been implemented successfully. Belgium’s regime is based on the notion of senior level parity and monolingual civil servants. Belgian civil servants are assigned to separate French and Dutch linguistic registers.⁴ Civil service positions have a specific language attached to them. As a result, for example, only a French-speaking Belgian can apply for or be promoted to a position that has been classified as French. There are important differences, however, in the proportion of positions assigned to each linguistic group. For lower-level public service positions, representation of each group is a function of the estimated work handled in each language in each department (so there are differences between different departments). For senior-level positions (from director and above), strict quotas have been adopted, with 50 per cent of positions assigned in a given department to Dutch speakers and 50 per cent to French speakers. Since French-speaking Belgians constitute a minority of the overall population, this means that they are slightly over-represented in the federal administration’s upper echelons.⁵ While bilingualism has increasingly been promoted in Belgium’s regime, it is not required for public servants. Finally, it must be stressed that there is, overall and despite occasional problems, wide compliance with the laws and regulations related to the representation of the different linguistic groups. The regime in Canada differs significantly from that in Belgium. While it is an objective of the federal public administration to reflect the country’s linguistic duality, setting or implementing quotas is strictly forbidden. To ensure a fair representation of French-speaking Canadians, who were historically significantly under-represented in the federal public administration, the federal government has made knowledge of both official languages (French and English) an element of merit in the selection of candidates. In the 1970s, specific regions, including the National Capital Region (Ottawa-Gatineau), were designated bilingual, which meant English and French were to be the languages of work for civil servant and some key positions were declared to require the knowledge of both. Since a higher proportion of French-speaking Canadians are bilingual, such

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Table 6.1 | Bureaucratic language regimes, Belgium and Canada BELGIUM

CANADA

Regime

Unilingual-Parity

IndividualBilingualism

Linguistic recruitment

Senior-level parity, lowerlevel proportionality

No formal mechanism

Linguistic requirements (senior officials)

No linguistic requirements

Bilingualism

Extent of regulations’ implementation

High

Moderate

measures helped augment their presence in the public service and brought a fairer representation of both language groups in federal institutions. In the early 1980s, new regulations established that all senior management positions in a bilingual region would henceforth be designated bilingual. Those requirements have not always been respected, as a good proportion of civil servants did not possess the linguistic qualifications associated with their position at the time of implementation.⁶ However, the situation has improved since the mid-2000s. Each country’s approach is summarized in table 6.1. In the next section, drawing on insights both from Jane Jenson’s work on the role of representation and discourse as well as Arendt Lijphart’s work on patterns of democracy, we introduce a theoretical approach to account for such variations. R E P R E S E N TAT I O N , I N ST I T U T I O N S, A N D CO ALITIONS: A T HEOR E T I C AL F R A ME WO R K

The politics of representative bureaucracy is about institutional change; in other words, it is the expression of how institutions such as the public service evolve over time. It is also about policy change, since the bureaucracy in that context is the object of policy-making. Students of public administration have tended to focus on the impact (or lack thereof ) of representative bureaucracy on public service performance (see Dolan and Rosenbloom 2003), and have neglected to study why and/or how the state (administrative) apparatus has been transformed in the first place.

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The literature on institutional and policy change constitutes a solid starting point to reflect on the transformation of the bureaucratic apparatus in a context of deep diversity. Especially relevant in the context of the politics of multilingual states is the “neo-structuralist” work of Jan Erk on federalism. For Erk, policy change is the result of attempts to make the institution of federalism congruent with the linguistic make up of any given federation. He sees multilingual federations as becoming more decentralized over time, and monolinguistic federations (such as Australia and Germany) as becoming more centralized (Erk 2008; Erk and Koning 2010). As such, the existence of different bureaucratic language regimes in multilingual countries could be seen as a reflection of those countries’ demographic make up. Such an approach certainly explains part of the story behind the adoption of different representative mechanisms in Belgium and Canada. For example, the parity in the distribution of senior positions between the two main linguistic groups in Belgium was less of an option in Canada, as French speakers in the latter case do not constitute as high a proportion of the population as in the former. However, there are limits to this perspective. First, it tends to neglect questions such as who promotes institutional change and how concretely such change is instituted, and therefore suffers from a certain form of societal determinism.⁷ Second, it cannot account for the timing of policy change or why, for example, concrete measures to ensure representation of linguistic groups were implemented in the 1960s in Belgium or in the 1970s in Canada. Finally, there is not a clear relationship between the rate of bilingualism in the overall population and its requirements in the bureaucracy. For example, the rate of bilingualism in Canada is 17.4 per cent, while it is estimated to be 40 per cent in Belgium (Statistics Canada 2007).⁸ A somewhat different approach is to analyze the type of representative measures adopted as congruent not only with the societal underpinning of a multilingual state, but also with its political institutions. Accordingly, in a case like Belgium, representative bureaucratic measures cannot be dissociated from the country’s consociational system, as the bureaucracy is also central to the country’s grand political bargain (Hood 2000, 183). There is great merit to this perspective, as it stresses that measures adopted to ensure a more representative bureaucracy are tied to the workings of the rest of the political system, the “game” played across the system’s institutions, and the different (perceived) interests of actors involved in the political bargain. However, while the organization of the bureaucracy cannot

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be divorced from the political system, it is not always congruent with the workings of those institutions. For example, while Canada’s parliamentary institutions were evolving in a bilingual manner prior to the 1960s, the bureaucracy was not. In order to understand the preference of social and political actors in a context of institutional change, it is imperative to look at the (changing) representation of the political community that influences them. Here we draw on the work of Jane Jenson, who – before the recent ideational turn in political science (Béland and Cox 2011) – had stressed the importance of representation, meaning, and identities in accounting for episodes of change. According to Jenson (1989, 237–8), “Politics in capitalist democracy involves representation, which is in part the social construction of collective identities. Actors bearing collective identities attempt to carve out constituency for themselves. Out of this process comes the mobilization of interests, which are also social constructions.” More precisely, it is not only cognitive ideas about the best policy solutions to a given problem that drive policy-makers, but also representation of the country’s foundational characteristics. Empirically, those representations can be investigated by exploring, at a given time, competing discourses about the political community in the public sphere, what Jenson (1989) presents as the “universe of political discourse.” Two aspects are key in the context of a multilingual state. The first is whether the discourse emphasizes the existence (or not) of distinct communities. As we show below, debates often pit those who stress the existence of only one community against those who stress the existence of distinct communities. The second is which defining characteristics of the political community are emphasized at a given period of time. For example, discourse that stresses a country’s religious identity may be more prevalent than one that stresses language diversity, but this may not always be the case. Representations of a political community are the object of political debates and conflicts. Specific representation may threaten the vision of the country of some actors and/or their perceived interests, political or professional. Jenson (1989, 238) argues, “as actors with a variety of collective identities co-exist in the universe of political discourse, their practices and meaning systems jostle with each other for social attention and legitimacy.” The capacity of certain actors to ensure the adoption and implementation of policy proposals that correspond to their representation of the political community and/or their perceived interest is influenced by the

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institutional setting in which they operate. First, certain institutional settings are more likely to favour the incorporation of minority ideas. This is especially the case in more fragmented types of political systems. Here, we draw on Lijphart’s (1999, 3) distinction between consensual and Westminster or majoritarian democracies; in the former, rules and institutions “aim at broad participation in government and broad agreement on the policies that the government should pursue.” Second, the relationship between the political and administrative spheres can hinder or facilitate the implementation of specific measures. Political systems in which political parties or the executives have strong influence over the allocation of bureaucratic positions favour the distribution of those positions according to a political logic of community representation rather than a simple (technocratic) logic of competence. Linking the institutional setting and the representation of the political community is the concept of coalition. According to Lieberman (2011, 215), “coalition building entails the convergence of purposive strategic political actors operating under common rules on particular courses of action that are collectively decided on and implemented.” The process of forming a coalition involves both representation and institutions, and so explaining that formation “requires an account of both the motivations of the disparate actors who come together to back particular outcomes and the decision-making structures and process that allow them to do so” (Lieberman 2011, 216). In the next section, we illustrate how distinct representations of the political community and different institutional settings interacted to create unique coalitions that contributed to the implementation of different bureaucratic linguistic regimes in Belgium and in Canada. T HE C OA LI T I ON P O LI T I CS O F R EP R ESEN TAT IV E BURE AUCRACY

As we argue above, the development of coalitions that support the adoption of measures to ensure a representative bureaucracy occurs in specific institutional settings. The institutional setting of the two countries under study varies in ways that have important repercussions for the building of coalitions and the elaboration of public policies. Canada has a majoritarian political system.⁹ Because of its first-pastthe-post electoral system, parliamentary system, and very weak Senate, power is highly concentrated in the executive and a one-party majority government is usually the norm. There is no guaranteed representation of

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a specific number of French speakers in the cabinet, and their presence has fluctuated significantly over the years. Political parties have mostly been non-ideological brokerage entities (Brodie and Jenson 1988; Bickerton et al. 1999), although a Quebec nationalist federal party emerged in the 1990s and was, for the following two decades, the most important political voice in the province. Belgium is a consensual democracy in which power is divided between political parties that represent different cleavages/pillars, and in which policy-making involves constant (re)negotiations between these parties. Such a system is made possible by a proportional representation electoral system and a party system organized along linguistic lines. Belgium is often considered a partitocracy, so “party leaders weigh disproportionally on the selection of aspiring elites not only in the party-political arena, but also in the administrative, judicial, cultural and socio-economic sectors” (Hooghe 2004, 84). The constitution guarantees an equal number of ministers for both linguistic communities. As we illustrate in the following sections, these different institutional configurations have interacted with different representation of the political communities and helped to establish distinct bureaucratic language regimes. Belgium

In many ways, while Belgium was a unitary state for the longest part of its history, it never really developed the strong “republican” ethos associated with such a state, as is the case in France. As Kenneth McRae (1986, 13) argues in his thorough investigation of linguistic conflicts in Belgium, the country was always characterized by a “highly diversified store of historical memories and traditions, and for generations it has served as a source of inspiration for those who become dissatisfied with the existing state and regime.” The civil service exacerbated conflicts between Belgium’s Frenchspeaking and Dutch-speaking Flemish communities in the nineteenth century. French was the dominant language of the central administration for most of that century and, consequently, the one that civil servants used to interact with the population, including the Dutch-speaking Flemish community. In fact, Dutch was only gradually accepted as an official language in the country, and it was only in 1898 with the Coremans-De Vriendt Law

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that it received official legal equality with French. Dutch was granted the right to co-exist with French in the Flemish provinces, while official monolingualism was never challenged in the Walloon provinces (McRae 1986, 25). However, Flemings continued to be largely excluded from the Belgian civil service. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was estimated that 80 per cent of the employment of the central ministries were Walloons and Luxembourgers, 14 per cent were “mostly francisized” Brusselers, and 6 per cent were Flemings (reported in McRae 1986, 190). In light of Flemish grievances about their exclusion from the bureaucracy, a law adopted in 1921 mandated that all Belgians exercising any public function in the central administration and in the Brussels area be able to demonstrate an elementary knowledge of the second official language. It also entrenched the principle of administrative unilingualism in Flanders and Wallonia. However, this legislation was never fully implemented and debates over the management of linguistic diversity in the public administration continued during the next decade. Debates about the representation of the Belgian political community along with the country’s unique institutional setting led to the creation of a unique coalition in support of language policy reform. First, the Walloon community rejected the representation favoured by the francophones of both Flanders and Brussels, what Rycx d’Huisnacht (quoted in Sonntag 1991, 12) presents as a cultural “syncretism” of the country’s Dutch-speaking and French-speaking cultures. Since such vision promoted bilingualism and individual choice, the mostly unilingual Walloon community increasingly viewed it as a threat to its own interests. Flemish nationalists increasingly also rejected the view of the traditional francophone elites, and in 1929 the leader of the Flemish Catholics stated, “we deny the language minorities in Flanders any right to exist” (quoted in Sonntag 1991, 66). Both communities increasingly favoured a representation of Belgium as a bicultural and biregional state. This coalition between Walloons and Flemish nationalists was made possible by a party system, which – while divided along class and religious lines – was also increasingly fragmented along linguistic lines in the second half of the 1920s (Sonntag 1991; Gerard 2006), with the creation of language groups in many parties. Members of those groups often demanded concessions in return for their support of the fragile coalitions in power in the late 1920s and early ’30s. Nevertheless, the traditional elite was still powerful and was able during parliamentary negotiations to limit

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the scope of the legislation adopted in 1932.¹⁰ The law abandoned the bilingual requirement, even for senior civil servants. It created the position of bilingual assistant, a bilingual associate from the other linguistic group, which would ensure the “unity of jurisprudence” (Belgium 1932, article 4, s. 3). It stated that, whenever possible, departments should be divided into French and Flemish sections, and that matters would be treated in the language in which they arose. Finally, it established separate registers for existing and future civil servants in each department and stated that future recruitment should have as one of its key objectives an obligation to ensure a just equilibrium between the communities. The legislation did not lead to a full reversal of the historical domination of French speakers in the bureaucracy for two reasons. First, it included many loopholes and no sanctions were attached to it. Second, religion and class were quickly reasserted as the dominant cleavage of the party system and, as such, the main focus of the political system. Nevertheless, it “reinforced the notion of a biregional and bicultural state” (Carter 2003, 212). As a result of the lack of implementation of the previous reform, a more thorough framework would be adopted in 1966, carried on the back of yet another linguistic crisis and a gradual but growing fragmentation of political parties along distinct linguistic units. The framework was in many ways identical to the one adopted in the early 1930s, with two important differences. First, as shown above, was the adoption of different rules for the upper and lower echelons of the bureaucracy, the creation of separate linguistic registers for French and Dutch, and separate linguistic sections in each department wherever the nature of the work warrants it. Second was the introduction of sanctions for non-compliance of the legislation (McRae 1986, 193). Key to the adoption of the law in the 1960s was the decline of two cleavages that had until then played a key role in Belgian politics: religion and class. Tensions between the church and the state had been attenuated after the signature in 1958 of the School Pact, which granted Catholic and public schools the same rights. Previously, the implementation of the post-war Keynesian welfare state had also contributed to the weakening of the economic cleavage that had pitted unionized workers and employers against one another. As a result of the decline of those two cleavages, the linguistic question became the central line of cleavage affecting the party system. First, before the split of all traditional parties into two different linguistic parties in the late 1960s and ’70s,¹¹ the main political parties gradually

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erected separate linguistic wings (see Deschouwer 2006). As a result, the language divide was institutionalized within the party system. Different parties also continued to gain more support in certain parts of the country: the Christian-Democrats in Flanders and the Socialists in Wallonia. Discussions about representation in the bureaucracy became part of a broader inter-party debate on linguistic boundaries, especially the status of Brussels. In return for additional rights in the Brussels region, Flemish politicians were willing to accept the concept of parity in appointment to the senior level of the civil service, despite the fact that Dutch speakers represented a greater proportion of the Belgian population. Changes adopted since 1970 have contributed to the implementation of this legislation. The most important has been the division of the party system along linguistic lines, combined with the parity rule in the Cabinet. Considering the high degree of the bureaucracy’s politicization, the presence of an equal number of ministers from each community ensures that the parity rule is also respected in public administration. The official transformation of Belgium in 1993 from a unitary state into a federation has not altered this rule. In short, the representation of the country as biregional and bicultural was central in the rejection of the principle of individual bilingualism in public administration and the organization of the bureaucracy into linguistic units. In the 1960s, as linguistic cleavages came to dislodge the previous religious and class cleavages, the Belgian consensus model of democracy made necessary negotiations (and coalition-building) between Flemish and francophone lawmakers on the language question, with the former willing to guarantee representation of francophones in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy in exchange for concessions, for example on the status of Brussels. Canada

In many ways, Canada is a sui generis case, and its bilingualism requirements challenge what might be seen as the majority linguistic group’s rational interest. According to Witte and Van Velthoven (1999, 25), the dominant linguistic group in a multilingual country will tend to oppose generalized individual bilingualism and will not tolerate linguistic heterogeneity on its territory, as it sees it as a clear threat to its interest. This certainly reflects the Belgian case. In Canada, however, with regard to the federal bureaucracy, the gradual adoption of individual bilingualism con128 | Luc Turgeon and Alain-G. Gagnon

stituted a clear advantage of the minority over the majority. At the time of the adoption of official bilingualism in Canada, only in Quebec, where a majority of the population speaks French, was more than 25 per cent of the population considered bilingual. Even today, more than forty years later, only 9.4 per cent of Canadians who have English as their mother tongue are considered bilingual (French-English), compared with 42.4 per cent of Canadians who have French as their mother tongue (Statistics Canada 2007, 26). Prior to the 1960s, the issue of the representation of French Canadians in the federal public service did not lead to significant debates. In 1867, when the Canadian federation was established, a number of government departments, including education and justice, “maintained [an] integrated bilingual establishment, [while] others were linguistically split right down the middle, starting at the top with the political head and going down to the subdivision of the various branches” (Wilson and Mullins 1978, 517). However, the professionalization of the Canadian bureaucracy – following the adoption of the Civil Service Commission (1908) and the enactment of the Civil Service Act (1918), which is often viewed as marking the introduction of the merit principle – led to a significant decline in French Canadians’ representation in the bureaucracy, as the political influence that had ensured it was removed from the selection process. The assumption was that rationality and efficiency precluded the use of a language other than English, the language of the majority (McRoberts 1997, 80). To require competence in a specific language, on the other hand, would challenge the merit system (Mallory 1971, 177). As a result, the proportion of French speakers working in the federal public service dropped from 21.6 per cent in 1918 to 12.5 per cent in 1944– 45. In the senior public service, the proportion was even more alarming. While 14 per cent of federal senior officials were francophones in 1918, their number gradually declined to 0 per cent in 1946 (Wilson and Mullins 1978, 520), although they represented around 30 per cent of the population. Indeed, the proposal a committee of French Canadian members of Parliament (the Jean committee) tabled to establish quotas to ensure French Canadians’ fair representation among deputy ministers was denounced by anglophones who viewed it as a breach of the merit principle (Commission Royale d’enquête sur le biculturalisme 1969, 111–12). Francophones’ lack of representation in public service is one of the factors that contributed to the rise in support for Quebec independence in the 1960s. According to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Bureaucratic Regimes in Belgium and Canada | 129

Biculturalism (b&b Commission) (1969, 95), “the possibility of national disintegration has forced a re-examination of the linguistic policies of the Public Service. The debate is no longer about efficiency, merit, patronage, and representation, but rather between thoroughgoing reform and schism. Change is imminent and no institution requires reform more urgently than does the federal administration.” In reaction to the rise of nationalist feelings and demand for recognition of Quebec’s national status in Canada, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, following the recommendations of the 1958 Heeney Report, adopted a policy of promotion of bilingualism. By 1967, in light of that policy, the Public Service Commission of Canada made skills in both official languages a “desirable qualification” for appointment to a position at a department’s headquarters. As Carson (1972, 191) argues: “The Commission’s working interpretation of the [Official Languages] Act is that in a bilingual country – where both English and French have equal status – it is in the best interest of its public service to be itself functionally bilingual. This means, in turn, that just as the merit principle is the basis of the Commission’s recruitment, selection, and appointment policies, bilingualism must become an element of merit for certain positions in certain areas of the country.” Conscious that such a decision could have a negative effect on (unilingual) public servants already working for the public administration, the Pearson government made appointments subject not so much to a candidate’s linguistic ability, but to an employee’s willingness, at public expense, to acquire second-language skill (Blackburn 1972, 36). There was nothing inevitable about the adoption of a policy that favoured individual bilingualism. In fact, the b&b Commission (1963–69), which had been created to address the rise of Quebec nationalism, proposed at the time a significantly different approach to ensuring the representation of French Canadians in the federal bureaucracy. The commission explicitly rejected the individual-bilingualism model that the Pearson government promoted and proposed a “partnership model.” As McRoberts (1997, 81) summarizes, “Equal partnership meant that Francophones not only must be present at all levels but they must be in a position both to work in their own language and to express their own culture. Much more was required than individual bilingualism; indeed, individual bilingualism was quite secondary.” Concretely, the b&b Commission proposed mechanisms to ensure “balanced participation” of francophones and anglophones at the upper echelons of the bureaucracy (deputy ministers, associate deputy

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ministers, and assistant deputy ministers), as well as the division of departments into linguistic units, ensuring that French Canadians could work in their own language. How can we explain the fact that the individual-bilingual model came to dominate the model proposed by the b&b Commission? The answer can be found in the unique coalition that emerged to promote and implement such a model, which was composed of anti-nationalist French Canadians, English-speaking politicians in both government and the Conservative opposition, and civil servants. That coalition emerged in the context of a profound redefinition of the Canadian political community, the result not only of the rise of Quebec nationalism, but also of the desire of English-speaking Canada to redefine itself in the context of the declining importance of the British cultural marker. Bilingualism, as well as multiculturalism (rather than biculturalism), allowed the Canadian political community to reimagine itself. Rather than being defined by its historical connection to Britain, Canada became a country in which individuals, from coast to coast, spoke one (or two) official language(s), French or English, and were of different ethnic and cultural origins. In short, cultural diversity became a defining characteristic of Canada. Key also was the role played by Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who replaced Pearson in 1968. Though French Canadian, Trudeau fought Quebec nationalism; he was pro-individualism and, as such, was opposed to any form of quotas for French Canadians as proposed by the b&b Commission. He never pushed for the implementation of French-language units. While a small number of bureaus were created on an experimental basis, mostly in the French part of the country, Trudeau believed they were a temporary measure (which they indeed were) to achieve a truly bilingual public administration. English-speaking politicians, civil servants, and members of the public rejected the notion of any guaranteed representation of French Canadians in the civil service as an encroachment on the merit principle. Moreover, most English Canadians shunned any form of separate treatment, as it breached their “unitary” view of the Canadian political community. The leader of the Conservative Party at the time, Robert Stanfield, rejected the creation of separate French-language units on the grounds that it created a “multitude of solitudes” (quoted in McRoberts 1997, 298).¹² Opposition also came from francophone civil servants. As McRoberts (1997, 83) argues, they “feared that without work experience in English their chances for mobility would

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be gravely handicapped,” as “they presumed that English would continue to have pre-eminence in Ottawa no matter what reforms were introduced.” Institutions helped ensure that this coalition’s preferences would be implemented. The majoritarian Canadian political system meant that, contrary to the case of Belgium, linguistic groups were not directly represented in political institutions and could not negotiate guaranteed quotas. Moreover, the system of brokerage parties, in which political parties had to broker the interest of French- and English-speaking Canadians in order to be elected, meant that parties could not be seen as adopting measures that favoured one specific community (especially the minority), in this case the French-speaking community. This is why Trudeau and subsequent prime ministers have stressed that there are no hiring quotas in the federal public service, that the goal of the programme is to ensure that Canadians can be served in the official language of their choice, and that bilingualism is simply an element of individual merit. Such measures have been controversial. But the majoritarian nature of the Canadian political system meant that the prime minister could easily ensure their adoption. The paradox of the Canadian situation is that by refusing to adopt quotas or develop separate linguistic units, the federal public administration has, in fact, contributed to a slight over-representation of French Canadians in public administration, as that French-speaking Canadians are more likely to be bilingual than their English-speaking counterparts. While the proportion of Canadians whose first official language is French formed 23.2 per cent of the Canadian population in 2011, the participation rate of francophones was 26.6 per cent for all federal institutions and 31.9 per cent for the core public administration (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat 2013, 8). Francophones are now better represented at the senior echelons, as they comprise 32.5 per cent of executives of the core public administration (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat 2013, 19).¹³ In short, the Canadian model was made possible by a significant reimagining of the political community, one in which bilingualism became one of its defining characteristics. Contrary to Belgium, Canada was not conceived as a biregional or bicultural country, which explains in large part why quotas were not adopted. Moreover, the majoritarian political system (and the party system founded on brokerage) in place in Canada ensured that the coalition that had developed around the proposed adoption of bilingualism requirements in the bureaucracy could impose its preferred policy solutions without having to negotiate with groups that may have

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wished to advance a different view of the country. As such, it was able to impose a bilingualism requirement in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy, despite the fact that the rate of bilingualism of the anglophone majority was and remains quite low. C ON C LUS I ON

In this chapter, we have argued that a community’s own representation of its internal diversity is crucial to understanding the politics of representative bureaucracy, as is the institutional setting in which political actors interact and evolve. Canada’s rejection of its own multinational character explains in large part the rejection of any measures that would have led to the organization of departments along linguistic units. On the other hand, the representation of Belgium as a country made of different political communities has been a key to the adoption of such linguistic units. We have also argued that these distinct representations of the political community interacted with the different institutional settings of each country to create certain types of reform coalitions. In short, in Belgium, the more consensual model of democracy meant ultimately in the 1960s that both French-speaking and Dutch-speaking parliamentarians had to be included in any reform coalition and, as such, that the language of the administration was simply one element of a broader agenda of state reform. As part of those negotiations, French speakers were able to obtain a firm guarantee of representation. In contrast, in Canada, the majoritarian political system made it easier for the prime minister to ensure the adoption of his coalition’s preferences. In the two countries studied, the issue of bureaucratic representation continues to be on the political agenda, as shown by recent debates in Belgium with respect to the lack of representation of French speakers in the upper echelons of the armed forces. Students of language conflicts need to pay much more attention to the key role the bureaucracy plays in ensuring harmonious linguistic relations. As for students of representative bureaucracy, we have for too long ignored the factors that lead policy-makers to adopt such corrective measures in the first place. At a time when demands for fair representation are gaining in popularity, studying the process of reception and adaptation to demands for representation has become an essential topic of research for political scientists.

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NOTES

1 This chapter is a revised version of material initially published in Luc Turgeon and Alain-G. Gagnon, 2013, “The Politics of Representative Bureaucracy in Multilingual Federations: A Comparison of Belgium, Canada and Switzerland,” Regional and Federal Studies 23 (4): 407–25. We concentrate our efforts on the Belgian and Canadian trajectories. We wish to thank Olivier De Champlain, Daniel Kübler, and Christpher Leite, as well as Linda Cardinal and Selma K. Sonntag, for providing helpful suggestions at different stages of this project. We also want to recognize the work of our research assistant Xavier Dionne. Finally, we want to acknowledge the financial support of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada (Study Team Grants) and the Secrétariat aux Affaires intergouvernementales canadiennes of the Government of Quebec (Programme de soutien à la recherche en matière d’affaires intergouvernementales et d’identité québécoise). 2 We concentrate on public administration at the federal as opposed to the regional and community (Belgium) or provincial (Canada) level, since our focus is on the interaction of linguistic groups at the central level of the state. 3 Front-line bureaucrats are usually required to simply master the language of the region in which they work. It is mostly at the senior level, and/or for those working in the federal capital, that linguistic requirements are at times adopted. 4 Belgium also has a small German minority, but there is no mechanism to ensure its representation. Members of that minority are assigned to one of the two linguistic registers based first on the language of their university education and second, if they have not studied in either French or Dutch, on the language they chose to be tested in to gain admission to the bureaucracy. 5 The Belgian census does not include questions on the mother language, which makes it impossible to have definite results on the proportion of the population of each language group. Estimates are usually that the francophone population corresponds to around 40 to 45 per cent of the overall population. 6 In 1978, 69.7 per cent of those occupying bilingual positions met the language requirements. In 2013, the percentage had increased to 95.4 (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat 2013, 16). 7 In some recent writings, Erk has incorporated in his model the role of civil society actors (see Erk and Koning 2010), however they remain an addition to the overall model. 8 The rate of bilingualism for anglophones is 9.4 per cent, compared to 42.4 per cent for francophones. Since there are no formal questions on language and language knowledge in the Belgian census, data are from a survey of the European Commission reported in Van Parys and Wauters (2006). The rate of bilingualism for Dutch speakers was 52.2 per cent, compared to 21.5 per cent for French speakers. 9 For a discussion of Canada in the context of Lijphart’s Westminster versus Consensus democracy, see Studlar and Christensen (2006).

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10 And, as Sonntag (1991) shows, the focus of the old bilingual elite was mostly to ensure continuous education rights for the French-speaking minority in Flanders. 11 Belgian political parties were split into two, with a French and a Dutch Socialist Party, for example, each working mostly independently from each other. 12 Stanfield’s quote refers to a famous Canadian novel, Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes, about the lack of contact of French and English Canadians. 13 Executives are those positions located, according to the Treasury Board’s definition, “no more than three hierarchical levels below the Deputy or Associated Deputy level and that have significant executive managerial or executive policy roles and responsibilities or other significant influence on the direction of a department or agency.”

REFERENCES

Béland, Daniel, and Robert H. Cox. 2011. Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Belgium. 1932. Loi du 28 juin 1932 sur l’emploi des langues en matière administrative. http://www.axl.cefan.ulaval.ca/europe/belgiqueetat-loi1932.htm. Bickerton, James, Alain-G. Gagnon, and Patrick Smith. 1999. Ties that Bind: Parties and Voters in Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Blackburn, G.A. 1972. “A Bilingual and Bicultural Public Service.” Canadian Public Administration 12 (1): 36–44. Brodie, Janine, and Jane Jenson. 1988. Crisis, Challenge and Change: Party and Class in Canada Revisited. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. Carson, John J. 1972. “Bilingualism in the Public Service.” Canadian Public Administration 15 (2): 190–3. Carter, Neal Alan. 2003. “Political Identity, Territory, and Institutional Change: The Case of Belgium.” Mobilization 8 (2): 205–20. Commission royale d’enquête sur le bilinguisme et le biculturalisme. 1969. Rapport, deuxième partie (L’administration fédérale). Ottawa: Imprimeur de la Reine. Deschouwer, Kris. 2006. “Ethnic Structure, Inequality and Governance of the Public Sector in Belgium.” In Ethnic Inequalities and Public Sector Governance, edited by Yusuf Bangura, 138–55. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Dolan, Julie, and David H. Rosenbloom, eds. 2003. Representative Bureaucracy: Classic Readings and Continuing Controversies. Armonk, ny : M.E. Sharpe. Erk, Jan. 2008. Explaining Federalism: State, Society and Congruence in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany and Switzerland. London: Routledge. Erk, Jan, and Edward Koning. 2010. “New Structuralism and Institutional Change: Federalism between Centralization and Decentralization.” Comparative Political Studies 43 (3): 353–78. Gerard, Emmanuel. 2006. La démocratie rêvée et bafouée, 1918–1939. Brussels: Éditions Complexes.

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Hood, Chistopher. 2000. “Relationship between Ministers/Politicians and Public Servants: Public Service Bargains Old and New.” In Governance in the TwentyFirst Century: Revitalizing the Public Service, edited by B. Guy Peters and Donald Savoie, 178–208. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Hooghe, Liesbet. 2004. “Belgium: Hollowing the Center.” In Federalism and Territorial Cleavages, edited by Ugo M. Amoretti and Nancy Bermeo, 55–92. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Jenson, Jane. 1989. “Paradigms and Political Discourse: Protective Legislation in France and the United States Before 1914.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 22 (2): 235–58. Lieberman, Robert C. 2011. “Ideas and Institutions in Race Politics.” In Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, edited by Daniel Béland and Robert H. Cox, 209–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lijphart, Arend. 1999. Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mallory, J.R. 1971. The Structure of Canadian Government. Toronto: Gage Publishing. McRae, Kenneth D. 1986. Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies: Belgium. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. McRoberts, Kenneth. 1997. Misconceiving Canada: The Struggle for National Unity. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. 1969. Report, Part 2 (The Federal Administration). Ottawa: Queen’s Printer. Sonntag, Selma K. 1991. Competition and Compromise Amongst Elites in Belgian Language Politics. Bonn: Dümmler. Statistics Canada. 2007. The Evolving Linguistic Portrait, 2006 Census. Ottawa: Statistics Canada, catalogue no. 97-555-xie . Studlar, Donley T., and Kyle Christensen. 2006. “Is Canada a Westminster or Consensus Democracy? A Brief Analysis.” ps : Political Science and Politics 37 (4): 837–41. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. 2013. Annual Report on Official Languages, 2012–2013. Accessed 20 Februay 2014. https://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/reportsrapports/ol-lo/12-13/arol-ralo/arol-ralo-eng.pdf. Van Parys, Jonathan, and Wauters, Sven. 2006. Les connaissances linguistiques en Belgique. Brussels: Centre de recherche en économie, Faculté universitaire Saint-Louis. Wilson, V. Seymour, and Mullins, Willard A. 1978. “Representative Bureaucracy: Linguistic/Ethnic Aspects in Canadian Public Policy.” Canadian Public Administration 21: 513–38. Witte, Els, and Harry Van Velthoven. 1999. Langue et politique: La situation en Belgique dans une perspective historique. Brussels: vub University Press.

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7 The Politics of Language Regime: A Comparative Analysis of Southeast Asia A MY H . LI U

Language regimes delineate which languages can be used when and where, and thereby institutionalize the distribution of linguistic powers (Liu 2015). They are inherently political. In this chapter, I argue both their stickiness (path dependency) and their changes are largely shaped by coalition politics. To better understand this mechanism, I focus on the language regimes of Malaysia and Singapore at four critical junctures. To make sense of the different types of language regimes, a conceptual typology (Collier, LaPorte, and Seawright 2012) may prove helpful. To that end, I identify two dimensions of interest. The first is the number of recognized languages (see figure 7.1). At one end, one – and only one – language is recognized. In principle, language regimes at this end of the spectrum are efficient (Laitin 1988; Pool 1991). Commerce and communication all occur in the same tongue, meaning translation volumes are kept to a minimum. At the other end of this same dimension, multiple languages are recognized. In principle, multilingualism breeds perceptions of equality and fairness. When a language is recognized, it suggests speakers of that language have some sort of respect or importance (Safran 2005). In fact, in some policy circles, individuals’ ability to conduct their daily lives in their language of choice is considered a human right (McColm 1990). However, transaction costs are high. When two individuals require translations in order to communicate, this can be expensive, whether it is in money or time. In aggregation, this cost is by no means trivial. Orthogonal to the number of recognized languages is the second dimension: the nativity of the recognized language(s). One possibility is that the recognized language is indigenous to the country of interest. The other

INDIGENOUS

Power Concentrating

Power Sharing

MONOLINGUALISM

MULTILINGUALISM

Power Neutralizing

Power Neutralizing

LINGUA FRANCA

Figure 7.1 | Conceptualizing language regimes

possibility is a lingua franca, a language spoken by many but the mother tongue of few – if any. It is a language of interethnic communication (Crystal 2003). There are three types of lingua francas: colonial languages, religious languages, and commercial languages. When discussing the nativity of a language, it is important to recognize that no natural language is a lingua franca across all contexts. For example, while Malay was historically a language of commerce throughout Southeast Asia, it is indigenous to the Thai-Malay Peninsula. These two dimensions together allow the comparison of language regimes between two Southeast Asian countries and over time in each one (see figure 7.2). The four causal process observations – Singapore 1959, Singapore 1965, Malaysia 1957, and Malaysia 1971 – provide broad variation in language regime choices. Singapore had a power-sharing language regime upon independence. But after the country’s expulsion from the Malaysian Federation, it shifted to power neutralizing. In contrast, Malaysia also first had a power-sharing language regime in 1957, but it was

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INDIGENOUS

Thailand

Malaysia 1971–

Power Concentrating

Power Sharing

(Standard Thai)

(Malay, Chinese, Tamil)

MONOLINGUALISM

MULTILINGUALISM

Indonesia

Malaysia 1957–71

Power Neutralizing

Power Neutralizing

(Indonesian/Malay)

(Malay, Chinese, Tamil, English)

LINGUA FRANCA

Figure 7.2 | Language regimes in Southeast Asia

short-lived. In 1971, following a leadership transition, the country shifted aggressively toward a Malay-dominant power-concentrating language regime. What explains these language regime differences? The answer has to do with coalitional constraints. When the politically dominant linguistic group needs the political support of other linguistic groups, it must co-opt them into a coalition. Within this coalition, the politically dominant group must offer linguistic concessions, which can take one of two forms. One is to recognize multiple languages, most importantly those of the minorities. This is a power-sharing language regime. The other is to recognize a lingua franca. This is known as a power-neutralizing language regime. When such coalitional constraints are weak if not absent, the politically dominant group can afford to choose any language regime. Under most conditions, this choice yields a power-concentrating language. The rest of this chapter proceeds as follows. I start with a theoretical argument specifying how coalitional composition can constrain language regime choices. I then lay out the research design, paying extra attention

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to case selection and operationalization of language regimes. I follow with the empirical evidence: first the two causal process observations for Singapore, and then the two causal process observations for Malaysia. I conclude by highlighting the political nature of language regime choice. C OA LI T I ONS A ND L A N G U A G E R EG I ME CH O I CE S

In this chapter, I operate with two assumptions. First, critical junctures are vital because language regimes can be path dependent: once a country sets down one trajectory, change is only possible during transitional moments (Mahoney 2000). Even when change is possible, state traditions make it very difficult. High costs mean that there is a strong bias toward reinforcing the status quo. Opting for change without regard to the costs can marginalize a large segment of the population. Yet, language regimes do change. Second, during these critical junctures in state development, the linguistic group that has access to the government and can mobilize effectively dictates language regime type. Often, theoretically and empirically, the politically dominant linguistic group is also numerically dominant. Under such conditions, that group prefers a power-concentrating language regime: monolingualism in the politically dominant language. Whether the language regime is power concentrating depends on if the politically dominant group maintains unilateral control of the government or if it needs other linguistic groups for support. The strength of each linguistic group relative to each other and to the strength of the state is of critical importance. If a minority linguistic group can threaten the government’s survival, the politically dominant group is forced to co-opt it. This co-optation develops through some institutionalized channel (such as a legislature) whereby the group is incorporated into a larger coalition (Gandhi 2008). A coalition – a larger group with a collection of heterogeneous preferences – can occur at various stages: the groups form a singular party, a pre-electoral front, or a post-electoral coalition. The arena for which these preferences are aggregated and the timing of when the coalition is created are not relevant here. Instead, what matters is whether the politically dominant group operates singularly or within a coalition. When a minority linguistic group is a part of the coalition, there is increasing demand for a non-power-concentrating language regime. Con-

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sider Malaysia 1957. In that case, two minority linguistic groups – Chinese and Indians – posed a credible threat to the politically dominant Malays. The subsequent language regime was a far cry from power-concentrating. Malay (the majority language) and English (the lingua franca) were both recognized as official languages; moreover, Chinese, English, Malay, and Tamil¹ were all permitted as languages of educational instruction in public schools. If no minority linguistic group is able to threaten the politically dominant group – i.e., the coalition constraint is absent – the latter can adopt a language of its choosing. There are three ways for this constraint to be absent. First, there is simply no minority linguistic group. While empirically rare, theoretically a country could be linguistically homogenous. In this scenario, there is simply no linguistic cleavage. Second, minority linguistic groups exist, but they cannot threaten the politically dominant group. As a result, they are never co-opted and a coalition never develops. Third, the minority linguistic group is large enough that continual exclusion and repression is too costly. As a result, it is co-opted into the coalition, but it does not have the capacity to threaten the government’s survival. In other words, while it may be enough of a threat to warrant co-optation, it lacks the relative strength to force policy concessions from the politically dominant group. This was the case in Malaysia 1971. Although the ruling coalition in Malaysia still included the Chinese and Indians, it was unable to constrain the politically dominant group from moving toward a power-concentrating language regime. Put simply, language regime choice is the product of constraints facing the politically dominant linguistic group at critical junctures in history. When there are macro changes to the political system, there are also changes to the institutionalized channels through which minority linguistic groups voice their demands. Examples of such changes include transitions from colonialism to independence, from authoritarianism to democracy, and from absolute monarchy to limited rule. These critical junctures can bring previously marginalized groups into the political fold. But not all macro changes yield such liberal outcomes. A transition toward authoritarianism, for instance, can effectively mute a minority linguistic group. Without a voice, its calls for linguistic recognition fall on deaf ears when the politically dominant linguistic group chooses a power-concentrating language regime.

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C HOOS I NG A L A N G U A G E R EG I ME Case Selection

To examine this argument, I employ a controlled comparison of Singapore and Malaysia. These two countries are appropriate for two reasons. The first involves scope conditions, specifically the relevance of language. In both countries, language was an exceptionally contentious matter in the early years after independence. The first prime ministers in both countries talked extensively about its importance for state-building (Lee 1998; Rahman Putra 1978). Today language is no less of a political matter in either country. As an extreme example, conducting research on and asking questions about language in Malaysia can be construed as a seditious activity. Second, the two countries lend themselves to a most similar design (George and Bennett 2005). Historically, both were British colonies. Not only were they subjected to the same governing institutions, but the British strategy for transferring power to the national governments was largely similar as well: neutralize the communist threat. London played an active role to ensure the survival of both states. In the Malaysian case, the British fought the communists in a twelve-year conflict known as the Emergency. In the Singaporean case, they helped negotiate the country’s merger into the Malaysian Federation – a policy then believed to be the only viable strategy for thwarting a communist takeover. Culturally, the two countries are equally diverse. The likelihood that any two people chosen at random will speak different languages is 74.7 per cent in Malaysia and 77.3 per cent in Singapore (Lewis 2009). Although Malaysia is indigenously more heterogeneous than Singapore, both were historical destinations for two immigrant groups. First, the Chinese, encouraged by the British, came in two waves. One wave was characterized by men from Fujian province who would marry local women (Skinner 1958). The next wave was characterized by immigrants from different provinces in China who remained intentionally segregated in their own communities upon arriving in the new country (Skinner 1963). Concurrent to the Chinese waves, there was a second group of immigrants: the British brought a large number of Tamil-speaking Indians to work in the tin mines and rubber plantations (Amrith 2011). By the time of independence, the census in both countries identified the same three demographic groups: Chinese, Indians, and Malays.

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Both countries also offer very comparable critical junctures at roughly the same times. This provides for systematic comparison of four causal process observations (Collier, Brady, and Seawright 2010). In Singapore 1959, there was a power-sharing language regime at independence. Four languages (Chinese, English, Malay, and Tamil) were used in schools with English and Malay as obligatory subjects. Then in 1965, after being expelled from the Malaysian Federation, the language regime shifted toward power-neutralization in the English language. In Malaysia 1957, there was also a power-sharing language regime across the same set of four languages. But in 1971, after parliament had been closed for two years, the language regime shifted drastically toward power-concentrating in the Malay language. The Operationalization of the Language Regime

Language regime is coded according to the de facto arrangement in the education curriculum. The focus on education is because it is one the “big three” arenas where politics over language use is especially pronounced (Fishman 1989). Of the three arenas – government services, public education, and mass media – education is arguably the most important, as it is a vision of the government’s future (Albaugh 2009). The claim that every instance of language planning in the world has involved the education ministry is no coincidence (Kaplan and Baldauf 2003). It is important to note that though law recognizes all languages equally, they are not de facto equal. Consider for example, a curriculum where the majority and minority languages are both recognized as mediums of instruction. Children from either linguistic group can attend school and learn history, math, and sciences in their mother tongues. But there is a caveat: the minority curriculum requires compulsory learning of the majority language as a subject alongside the minority-language-employed history, math, and science classes. The converse, however, is not true. Students in the majority curriculum are not required to learn even the basics of the minority language. From a de jure standpoint, this language regime would be considered power-sharing, but from a de facto one, it is hard to consider it anything but power-concentrating. For all intents and purposes, linguistic power is concentrated in the majority’s language. To identify which language is first among equals – and hence the de facto language regime – I focus on the compulsory languages taught as subjects.

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S I N GA P OR E Observation One: Pre-Merger 1959

After World War ii , the British returned to Singapore with the first election set for 1959. Leading up to 1959, a group of English-educated men, led by Lee Kuan Yew, formed the People’s Action Party (pap ). From the outset, the English speakers knew electoral victory and complete independence would be impossible without the Chinese population’s coalitional support. The Chinese were not only a majority but also predominantly communist. Although the pap was ideologically leftist, the party was fundamentally anti-communist. The Chinese were led by the hugely popular Lim Chin Siong. Aside from its numerical dominance, the group had access to financial resources. Several wealthy communist sympathizers, domestically and abroad, offered monetary support. Moreover, the threat of the communists’ ability to protest en masse and incite violence was credible. The 1955 Hock Lee bus riots and the 1956 Chinese Middle School Students Union riots are two of the more violent examples (Lee 1998). Despite the linguistic (and ideological) differences between Lee and Lim, the former was aware that he needed the latter’s electoral support. Without the Chinese, complete independence would not be possible. Consequently, Lee and the pap heavily courted them.² However, despite the subsequent coalition, there was mutual distrust between the two groups. Lee (1998, 373) recounted that from day one, the Chinese were an “albatross around the neck.” Moreover, he feared that “if we fail, brute force returns” (319). During this period, the Chinese threat was high and the state’s strength relatively weak. With the coalition, the pap recognized the arrangement as precarious. In response, it co-opted two other minority linguistic groups (in other words, Malays and Tamils) and presented itself as a multiracial party. What were the implications of these constraints on language regime choices? The pap opted for a combination of languages whereby Chinese, English, Malay, and Tamil were all recognized. As Lee (1998, 216) decided, “Whether or not it was practical, the only politically defendable policy was trilingualism, with Malay as the lingua franca and the future national language of Malaya, English as the language of international commerce and science, Mandarin as the mother tongue of the Chinese, and Tamil, Hindi,

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or Punjabi for the Indians.” The education curriculum reflected this trilingualism. Given the fragmented system inherited from the British, the English faction believed it was “political[ly] imperative [and urgent] to create an indigenous and integrated national school system united by a common language policy” (E. Tan 2007, 79). As a result, all four languages were recognized as mediums of instruction at the primary and secondary levels. This, however, necessitated standardization – and the English curriculum served as the standard bearer. The Chinese curriculum was restructured from a total of twelve years to ten to match that of English schools (Fong 1979). The Malay and Tamil curriculums were also given attention (Gopinathan 1974). The primary emphasis was on standardizing the curriculums and making them available at large. Historically, the British had supported only secular primary morning classes for the Malay community, while the Malay community bore the costs for the afternoon Qur’an instruction. In contrast, the British supported Tamil-medium education in full, but as many Indians did not complete their primary studies for a host of different reasons, Tamil secondary education was never developed (Burhanudeen 2006). Given the then-limited access in schooling, the pap focused on developing Malay and Tamil secondary schools. Across all four curriculums, English and Malay were required subjects (Kaplan and Baldauf 2003; E. Tan 2007). Although it was “the only politically defendable policy” (Lee 1998, 216), a power-sharing language regime served two purposes. First, it denied the communist Chinese the opportunity to label Lee and his English-educated colleagues as “enemy and destroyer of Chinese culture” (Lee 1998, 409). Chinese schools were not only a necessary instrument for the teaching of classical Chinese scholarship, but also fertile grounds for breeding communism. Second, the power-sharing language regime gave the pap an opportunity to signal to the Malayan Malays its willingness to recognize the Malay language as the “first among equals.” This recognition was critical for the success of the merger with Malaya to create Malaysia – a policy Lee advocated. As a result, the pap spent considerable energy developing an Institute of Malayan culture to promote the Malayan culture (Sunday Times 1959a); sponsoring Malay language awareness programs (Sunday Times 1959b); and making the learning of Malay compulsory in all schools (E. Tan 2007). The story of Singapore’s language regime choice during this pre-merger period matches theoretical expectations: when the threat of minority

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linguistic groups is high, language regimes shift away from being powerconcentrated. In this case, the English-educated chose a power-sharing language regime as a concession to everyone (Chinese, Indians, and Malays). Multiple languages would be taught at schools. Observation Two: Post-Merger 1965

In 1965, Singapore was expelled from the Malaysian Federation. Although 1959 was the first general election under “three-fourths” independence, 1965 was the first year that Singapore was left to govern its own affairs completely. While the Lee-led pap remained in power, the mechanism through which the Chinese and Malays constrained the politically dominant group had changed. Previously, the cleavage had been between the English and Chinese groups within the pap ; in the post-merger period, with Singapore-Malaysia tensions still high, it was between the Chinese and Malays. This shift reflects the corresponding changes in census classifications. Prior to 1965, group identification was based on “the language of one’s primary socialisation, or one’s ‘native speech’” (E. Tan 2007, 79). With this classification, individuals like Lee often considered themselves more English than Chinese. In fact, in his memoirs, Lee (1998) recalls feeling alienated while studying at Cambridge; he was aware, given his Chinese inadequacies, that he did not share the same sentiments as other Chinese students. But in 1966, native speech identification ceased to exist. Instead, “mother tongue” became defined strictly as the “symbolic language of the group of one’s paternal ancestry” (E. Tan 2007, 79). With this new definition, Lee became “Chinese” overnight. Also overnight was the shift of Malay from lingua franca to minority language and of English to lingua franca. The threat of the minority linguistic groups was still high during this time of political crisis. The communist Chinese could still protest en masse – and did. There were a number of demonstrations and hit-andruns, including a sizable May Day demonstration in 1967 where numerous injuries were recorded and forty-six rioters were arrested (Fong 1979). Additionally, aside from escalating tensions between the Chinese and the Malays (which included riots that spilled over from Malaysia), there were doubts over Malay allegiance in the event of a conflict with Malaysia. Simply put, “the pressures following separation were relentless [and] there

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was never a dull moment in [Singapore’s] relations with Malaysia” (Lee 2000, 261; S. Tan 2007). But the threat of the Chinese and the Malays during this period had less to do with the groups themselves than with the weakness of the state. Recall, threat is relative: it is about the strength of the group vis-à-vis the state. The Singaporean state in the post-merger period was exceptionally weak. Economic frustrations (e.g., lack of foreign reserves, insufficient land to harvest rice, and high unemployment) and security concerns (e.g., Malaysia-Singapore tensions and Malaysia-Indonesia war) are evidence of this larger vulnerability. All this was reflected in the government’s unceasing “survival” rhetoric. Foreign Affairs Minister S. Rajaratnam once remarked, “Why we harp on the survival theme … is … not [a] gimmick to rally support for the government … We are not thinking about the next elections. We are thinking of how Singapore can survive” (Chan and ul Haq 1987, 210–11). This precarious situation would increase – from a relative standpoint – the threats of the communist Chinese and Malays. As predicted, the language regime shift matched this political landscape. While technically the same set of four languages remained mediums of instruction, and while rhetorically the government claimed there was “no language issue” over Malay’s continued status as the national language (Sunday Times 1966), in fact, any acknowledgement of Malay was superficial. The language regime would shift toward power neutralization via English. Recall, with changes to the definition of mother tongue for the census, the linguistic cleavage was now between the Chinese and the Malays. Malay was no longer considered the lingua franca; in its place was now English. In all curriculums, regardless of the student’s native language, English became a compulsory language of study. These changes became even more drastic with the passage of the Goh Report (1979), a key document that marked “pap ’s clear ideological shift towards meritocracy” (Kwok 1999, 62). The Goh Report emphasized economic efficiency in manpower and technical and vocational training (Doshi and Coclanis 1999) over cultural equity. In fact, it did little to alleviate Malay perceptions of the pap as a “Chinese-based party whose multiracial ideology was little more than rhetoric” (Rahim 1998, 73). The ultimate policy was in 1983 when all non-English schools (not just Malay but Chinese and Tamil as well) were closed. Ever since then, English has been the exclusive language of instruction (Ganguly 2003; Kaplan and Baldauf 2003; E. Tan 2007), rendering the language regime de jure and de facto completely power-neutralizing.³

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MA L AYS I A Observation One: Democracy under Tunku 1957

The British also returned to Malaya in 1945. Shortly thereafter, in 1946, the United Malays National Organisation (umno ) emerged to oppose a specific set of British policies but largely continued to support the British. In fact, it cooperated with the colonial authorities to defeat the communist insurgency. Over time, the umno ’s moderate (in other words, non-anti-imperialist and non-communist) position elevated its importance when negotiations eventually shifted to independence. While the British were willing to grant independence, the umno – led by Tunku Abdul Rahman since 1951 – knew the colonial authorities would suspend negotiations as soon as evidence of racial tensions surfaced. As a result, it co-opted two minority linguistic groups into a larger front: the non-communist Chinese and the Indians. As was the case in Singapore, the Chinese threat was high. They commanded a sizable population and held wealth disproportionally greater than their size (Silcock in Abdul Samad 1998). The non-communist Chinese were represented politically by the Malayan Chinese Association (mca ), which had emerged in 1949 to challenge the Malayan Communist Party. Because of the mca ’s ideological position, the Kuomintang (nationalist, non-communist party in China) and the British supported the party. In the 1952 Kuala Lumpur municipal council elections, the umno and mca agreed to avoid contesting the same seats. The coordination yielded shocking results: the umno -mca coalition won nine of the twelve seats – a devastating setback for the larger anti-imperialist Malay parties. Given its success, in 1955 the umno -mca coalition under the front of Alliance Party formally contested the legislative council election. It won all but one of the fifty-two seats. Aside from the Chinese non-communists, the Indians were also of importance. While smaller, the Tamil-speaking Indian minority was still politically significant, and was represented by the Malayan Indian Congress (mic ). Under the leadership of K.L. Devaser, the mic joined the Alliance Party. With independence as the ultimate objective, the three parties (umno , mca , and mic ) agreed to the Bargain, a contract that included multiple arrangements. The Bargain proved to be necessary to guarantee not only

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Malayan independence but also Alliance control in the new government. Theoretically, politically dominant groups constrained by minority linguistic groups would shift language regimes away from being powerconcentrated, and this indeed happened. One of the arrangements in the Bargain was the recognition of Malay as an official language of the state (Burhanudeen 2006; Lee 2007). While the mca wanted Chinese and the mic wanted Tamil to be recognized as well, the costs of a failed Bargain were too large. Failure would not only have suspended talks, but could have also been political fodder for the communists. Perhaps more interesting was the continued use of English as an official language. Members of the umno wanted Malay monolingualism. Tunku (1978, 84) even once remarked, “A plural nation … must have a national language … otherwise independence is meaningless.” But Tunku also knew that a power-concentrating language regime was not possible given the threats of the mca and the mic . The best compromise was to recognize English. However, its official status was only temporary – the agreement permitted for the removal of English in ten years (1967). And as a concession, all four languages (Chinese, English, Malay, and Tamil) were recognized as mediums of instruction in the education system. There would be two types of education curriculums. In the national curriculum, Malay was to be the medium of instruction. Malay and English were both obligatory subjects. Chinese and Tamil were to also be taught if there was demand. This distribution of linguistic power could be found at both the primary and secondary levels of schooling. In contrast, in the national-type curriculum, the main medium of instruction at the primary level was Chinese, English, or Tamil. English would be the only language of instruction at the secondary level. In these schools, regardless of the principal language of instruction, both English and Malay were compulsory subjects (Ganguly 2003; Kaplan and Baldauf 2003; Shaw 1976). Observation Two: Authoritarianism Post-Tunku 1971

The Bargain was clearly important during the transition to independence. It was the result of the politically dominant Malays constrained by two minority linguistic groups of high threat. What would have happened if this threat had been low? The events of 1971 are a natural counterfactual. That year, Malaysia underwent a significant political transition. In response to the 1969 riots, the sultan (Yang di-Pertuan Agong) declared a

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state of emergency and suspended democracy. During this time, Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Razak replaced Tunku as the head of government. When parliament reconvened again in 1971, the umno had a second chance to shift the language regime. After all, in 1967, the ten-year status of English as an official language had expired, though English was still used in all official capacities. In this second observation, there was a visible shift in the political landscape. First and foremost, the British were no longer a part of the political calculations. With the defeat of the Conservative Party in the 1964 election in Great Britain, the British were looking to withdraw all their troops east of the Suez (Lee 1998). Second, while there was still an umno -led coalition (National Front), the threat of the mca and the mic had diminished quite drastically compared with 1957 (Abdul Samad 1998). This was especially true for the former, which had lost much of its organizational strength and funding sources. By this point, a number of Chinese splinter parties had emerged; one in particular appropriated the mca ’s seats in the 1969 election. These developments suggested that while the mca was still an important Chinese party, its influence within both the governing coalition and the Chinese community had been significantly diffused. This was most evident in the fact that the National Front included not only the three original members of the Alliance Party but as many as ten other parties – including four Chinese parties – situated in a vertical hierarchy (Abdul Samad 1998, 118). Given the weakening of the mca and the mic , theoretically one would expect a power-concentrating language regime. Empirically, this was what happened: English was immediately stripped of its official status. It was also phased out of all schools and, simultaneously, Malay was introduced as the exclusive language of instruction at the secondary level. While there is no doubt that Razak would have chosen an exclusive Malay linguistic arrangement if possible, the fact was that the Chinese and Indian communities were still of some relevance. Subsequently, some concessions were made to the minority linguistic groups. The education ministry allowed Chinese and Tamil primary schools to stay open (Ganguly 2003), although Malay was a compulsory subject. Additionally, students from these schools were required to attend a one-year Malay-medium transition school before proceeding to the Malay-language secondary schools, where Chinese and Tamil were optional subjects (Kaplan and Baldauf 2003).

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C ON C LUS I ON

The choice over any language regime is inherently a political decision, as the Singapore and Malaysian cases show. While both countries shared similar colonial legacies and started their first causal process observations with similar political constraints and language regimes, they ultimately diverged by the second. This is because of coalitional constraints. In the Singapore case, the state’s extreme vulnerability forced the politically dominant group to adopt a power-neutralizing language regime. In contrast, in the Malaysian case, the lack of a comparable threat from the partners in the National Front allowed the politically dominant Malays to concentrate linguistic powers.

NOTES

1 Unless otherwise noted, all linguistic groups and their corresponding languages are listed alphabetically to avoid any implication as to who has more value or importance. 2 Lim Chin Siong agreed to join the pap and form a coalition versus running his own party to challenge the pap because he knew the British would never allow it. 3 There are Special Assistance Plan schools that offer bilingual curriculums (namely English-Chinese).

REFERENCES

Abdul Samad, Paridah. 1998. Tun Abdul Razak: A Phenomenon in Malaysian Politics. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Affluent Master Sdn Bhd. Albaugh, Ericka A. 2009. “The Colonial Image Reversed: Language Preferences and Policy Outcomes in African Education.” International Studies Quarterly 53: 389–420. Amrith, Sunil S. 2011. Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press. Burhanudeen, Hafriza. 2006. “Language and Social Behavior: Voices from the Malay World.” p hd diss., Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Chan, Heng Chee, and Obaid ul Haq. 1987. The Prophetic and the Political: Selected Speeches and Writings of S. Rajaratnam. Singapore: Graham Brash Pte Ltd. Collier, David, Henry Brady, and Jason Seawright. 2010. “Sources of Leverage in Causal Inference: Toward an Alternative View of Methodology.” In Rethinking

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Social Inquiry, edited by Henry Brady and David Collier, 161–200. Lanham, md : Rowman and Littlefield. Collier, David, Jody LaPorte, and Jason Seawright. 2012. “Putting Typologies to Work: Concept-Formation, Measurement, and Analytic Rigor.” Political Research Quarterly 65: 217–232. Crystal, David. 2003. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Malden, ma : Blackwell Publishing. Doshi, Tilak, and Peter Coclanis. 1999. “The Economic Architect: Goh Keng Swee.” In Lee’s Lieutenants: Singapore’s Old Guard, edited by Peng Er Lam and Kevin Y.L. Tan., 24–44. St Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin. Fishman, Joshua A. 1989. Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective. Clevedon, uk : Multilingual Matters. Fong, Sip Chee. 1979. The pap Story: The Pioneering Years. Singapore: Times Periodicals Pte Ltd. Gandhi, Jennifer. 2008. Political Institutions under Dictatorship. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ganguly, Šumit. 2003. “The Politics of Language Policies in Malaysia and Singapore.” In Fighting Words: Language Policy and Ethnic Relations in Asia, edited by Michael E. Brown and Šumit Ganguly, 239–62. Cambridge, ma : mit Press. George, Alexander L., and Andrew Bennett. 2005. Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. Cambridge, ma : Belfer Center for Science for International Affairs, Harvard University. Gopinathan, Saravanan. 1974. Towards a National System of Education in Singapore 1945–1973. Singapore: Oxford University Press. Kaplan, Robert B., and Richard B. Baldauf, Jr. 2003. Language and Language-inEducation Planning in the Pacific Basin. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kwok, Kian-Woon. 1999. “The Social Architect: Goh Keng Swee.” In Lee’s Lieutenants: Singapore’s Old Guard, edited by Peng Er Lam and Kevin Y.L. Tan., 45–69. St Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin. Laitin, David D. 1988. “Language Games.” Comparative Politics 20: 289–302. Lee, Kuan Yew. 1998. The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew. Singapore: Prentice Hall. – 2000. From Third World to First: The Singapore Story. Singapore: Times Media Private Limited. Lewis, Paul M. 2009. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Dallas: sil International. Liu, Amy H. 2015. Standardizing Diversity: The Political Economy of Language Regimes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mahoney, James. 2000. “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology.” Theory and Society 29: 507–48. McColm, R. Bruce. 1990. Freedom in the World: Political Rights and Civil Liberties. New York: Freedom House.

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Pool, Jonathan. 1991. “The Official Language Problem.” American Political Science Review 85: 495–514. Rahim, Lily Zubaidah. 1998. The Singapore Dilemma: The Political and Educational Marginality of the Malay Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rahman Putra, Abdul. 1978. Viewpoints. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd. Safran, William. 2005. “Introduction: The Political Aspects of Language.” In Language, Ethnic Identity, and the State, edited by William Safran and Jean A. Laponce, 1–14. New York: Routledge. Shaw, William. 1976. Tun Razak: His Life and Times. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Longman Malaysia Sdn. Berhad. Skinner, G. Williams. 1958. “The Chinese of Java.” In Colloquium on Overseas Chinese, edited by Morton H. Fried, 1–10. New York: Institute of Pacific Relations. – 1963. “The Chinese Minority.” In Indonesia, edited by Ruth T. McVey, 97–117. New Haven, ct : hraf Press. Sunday Times. 1959a. “Institute of Malayan Culture.” 23 August. – 1959b. “Translating Done Free during L-Week.” 25 March. – 1966. “Ong: There’s No Language Issue.” 22 November. Tan, Eugene K.B. 2007. “The Multilingual State in Search of the Nation: The Language Policy and Discourse in Singapore’s Nation-Building.” In Language, Nation and Development in Southeast Asia, edited by Hock Guan Lee and Leo Suryadinata, 74–117. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Tan, Siok Sun. 2007. Goh Keng Swee: A Portrait. Singapore: Editions Didier Millet.

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8 Mandarin State Tradition and Language Regime Change in Taiwan JEAN-FRANÇOIS DUPRÉ

Language regime change can be a complex and contentious political process. Far from being limited to administrative efficiency, official languages are often powerful state symbols and their legitimacy hinges on balancing linguistic utility with different types of allegiances, such as ethnic and national identities. Language regime change often takes place in the context of cultural normalization¹ movements that seek to counter and overturn hegemonic cultural regimes perceived as discriminatory or otherwise illegitimate. In cases like Catalonia, Flanders, and Quebec, historical linguistic majorities have been particularly successful at officializing their language and promoting it as the symbolic core of new regional (or even national) identities. Successful normalization, however, to a certain extent requires detaching language from ethnicity to enable citizens of all ethnic backgrounds to espouse the common public language as a civic identity marker. In societies where ethnic, national, or political cleavages are sharper, language regime change can involve particularly complex bargaining processes, and linguistic outcomes may or may not align with ethnolinguistic configurations or national identity developments. In these cases, language regimes often end up reflecting linguistic utility rather than demolinguistic configurations or ethnolinguistic identities (Laitin 1992). Language regimes in such polities often settle on a lingua franca that is largely perceived as ethnically neutral. The case of Taiwan (formally known as the Republic of China, roc ) embodies the complexity of language regime change in the context of linguistic hegemony, ethnic conflict, contested national identities, and party competition. Taiwan’s population is essentially Han Chinese,² but is di-

vided into three mutually unintelligible ethnolinguistic groups. About 70 per cent are Hoklo,³ whose ancestral language is usually referred to as Taiwanese, 15 per cent are Hakka (originally speaking Hakka), and 12 per cent are mainland immigrants of diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds who largely assimilated to Mandarin at an early stage of Taiwan’s post-1949 history (Her 2009). Additionally, about 3 per cent are Austronesian aboriginals (yuanzhumin), themselves divided into fourteen officially recognized groups speaking dozens of languages.⁴ After fifty years of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945), during which Japanese was used as the language of administration, Mandarin (known in Taiwan as Guoyu, literally “national language”) was imposed as the de facto national and official language as part of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or kmt ) authoritarian government’s re-Sinicization programme. Following democratization, the revitalization of local cultures and languages – especially Taiwanese – has been an important element of the Taiwanization movement. However, the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (dpp ) government did little to change Taiwan’s language regime during its two terms (2000–08). It rejected proposals for the co-officialization of Taiwanese, and instead vainly proposed the recognition of all of Taiwan’s languages as equal national languages. Since much of the revivalists’ efforts at reversing the Mandarin-dominated language regime have focused on the official recognition of Taiwan’s local languages, language regime change can largely be considered a failure. The Taiwanese experience raises a number of questions that are relevant to understanding language regime maintenance and change. Why was the dpp government unable or unwilling to change the language regime despite the consolidating shift toward a Taiwanese identity? What explains its preference for a multilingual rather than Hoklo-centred regime? How does language – in particular Taiwanese – relate to other aspects of Taiwanese identity, and what are the prospects for language regime change in Taiwan? What is the role of political parties in the context of cultural counter-hegemony movements? In this chapter, I try to shed light on these questions. First, I survey historical developments in ethnolinguistic relations and national identity in contemporary Taiwan, and outline the characteristics of Taiwan’s Mandarin-dominated language regime. Second, I analyze developments in linguistic normalization and constraints to language regime change under the dpp government (2000–08) by focusing on three interrelated case studies: the Taiwanese co-officialization

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movement of 2002, the Languages Equality Law proposal of 2003, and the National Languages Development Law proposal of 2007. I conclude with the prospects for language regime change in Taiwan, and highlight the significance of Taiwan for the future of non-Mandarin Sinitic languages in the greater China region. Certain elements inherent to the historical development of Sinitic languages render their officialization more difficult. For instance, lack of standardization prevents them from competing effectively with Standard Mandarin Chinese in high domains and reinforces the belief that they are mere dialects. Moreover, the sheer diversity in speech forms in the Sinitic world renders the promotion of a common language all the more necessary. However, in this chapter I argue that constraints to language regime change in Taiwan are more political than linguistic. The fact that the dpp constituted a minority government evidently hindered its institutional capacity to enact language regime change. Yet, this aspect of party politics does not fully explain why the dpp was unable to create a bandwagoning effect on language regime change, especially in light of the consolidating shift toward a Taiwanese identity in recent years. The dpp , on top of being a Hoklo power base, is a pro-independence party that capitalizes heavily on the national identity issue. It has been forced into a dilemma: either appeal to Hoklo interests and shun non-Hoklo supporters of independence, or broaden its power base by emphasizing a multicultural Taiwanese identity over Hoklo interests. The absence of a consensus on the cultural parameters of Taiwanese identity has created further incentives for parties to de-radicalize their ideologies and engage in ethnic and identity underbidding.⁵ In this chapter, I argue that a consolidated language shift toward Mandarin (the hegemonic language), a civic Taiwanese identity based on roc institutions rather than cultural distinctiveness, and ethnic underbidding strategies in the context of party politics largely account for the failure of language regime change and the maintenance of a de facto unilingual Mandarin state tradition. E T HNOLI NGUI S TI C R EL AT I O N S A N D N AT I O N AL IDE NTIT Y IN TAIWAN

Taiwan’s first inhabitants were Austronesians who settled on Taiwanese territory about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, and their descendents now form the country’s aborigine population. It was not until the mid-seventeenth century that Han Chinese began to settle extensively on Taiwanese terri-

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tory. Taiwan was formally annexed to China under the Qing dynasty in 1683. During Qing rule, the bulk of Chinese immigrants to Taiwan originated from Southern Fujian. They were thus, for the most part, speakers of the Southern Min language (i.e., “Taiwanese”). The second ethnocultural group in importance was the Hakka, most of which emigrated from the Eastern Guangdong area. As institutions and culture from the mainland were transplanted onto the island, Taiwan developed into a predominantly Chinese society. It is estimated that by the end of Qing rule on Taiwan in 1895, the Hoklo people accounted for 82 per cent of the Han population and the Hakka for 16 per cent, while aboriginals had already been reduced to a small minority (Lamley 1981, 291–3). Taiwan was ceded to Japan following China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. As Japan intended to fully integrate Taiwan into its empire, it encouraged the Taiwanese to gradually assimilate into Japanese culture and society. Following its invasion of China in 1937, Japan implemented a policy of Japanization that translated into a Japanese-only linguistic policy, and by the end of its rule on Taiwan, a majority of the Taiwanese population could at least understand Japanese (Hsiau 2000, 125). By that time, Japanese effectively played the role of administrative and public language – the high standard – while Sinitic languages were relegated to the status of low vernaculars. The Southern Min language, however, remained the main lingua franca among different Taiwanese ethnic groups and was so widespread that the Japanese referred to it as “Taiwanese” (in Japanese, Taiwango) – a legacy that persists to this day. In 1945, the roc was given mandate over Taiwan, which was reintegrated as a province of China. The takeover by the kmt -led roc in 1945 was initially welcomed, but the coarseness of mainland troops together with the inefficiency and corruption of officials shocked many Taiwanese. Animosity among indigenous Taiwanese toward mainlanders was further exacerbated by the 228 Incident in 1947, in which island-wide mass protests organized by native Taiwanese against the government were violently repressed by the authorities, leaving a large yet undetermined number of casualties. The massacre marked the beginning of hostilities between Taiwan’s indigenous population, especially the Hoklo majority, and the mainlanders, who stood as a political class and were increasingly seen as colonizers. Ethnic hostilities only worsened following the influx of hundreds of thousands of mainlanders in 1949 as the kmt -led roc administration, headed by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, took refuge on

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Taiwan after being defeated by the Communists on the mainland. Far from accepting the prospects of a Two-China solution, the kmt government saw its exile as temporary and vowed to reconquer the mainland. Due to the tense situation across the Taiwan Strait, the government imposed martial law and intensified its crackdown on Communist and independentist activities. In the face of the Communists’ attempts to do away with traditional Chinese values in the newly proclaimed People’s Republic of China (prc ), the roc government tried to boost its legitimacy as a more authentic repository of Chinese culture. Domestically, one of the kmt ’s priorities was to remove Japanese influence and re-Sinicize (caizhongguohua) the Taiwanese population. As in many cases of national identity engineering, language, and education were the pillars of identity shift in post-war Taiwan. As early as 1946, the government created the National Language Promotion Committee (guoyu tuixing weiyuanhui) under the Taiwan Provincial Ministry of Education, with the mandate to work on the standardization and spread of Mandarin. In 1956, Mandarin became the only permissible medium of instruction in schools, in a curriculum designed to inculcate Chinese identity and patriotism. The Mandarin-only policy was strengthened in subsequent decades in the domains of education, media, and administration, as local languages were banned from schools and restricted in public broadcasts. Government officials were also compelled to carry out their public duties in Mandarin. On the whole, the Mandarin-only policy, coupled with the ethnic hierarchy that favoured mainlanders in administrative positions, perpetuated and reinforced the diglossia created under the Japanese in which indigenous Sinitic languages (not to mention aboriginal ones) were reduced to low-status vernaculars. The Mandarin-only campaign was decidedly successful: in 1945 only some Taiwanese intellectuals could use Mandarin, but by the 1980s the vast majority of Taiwan’s population was conversant in it, and a substantial segment identified as Chinese. For most Taiwanese, this shift from non-standard oral “dialects” to Mandarin was empowering. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Mandarin had become the first language of a substantial segment of younger generations who can often barely comprehend their ancestral languages, including Taiwanese (Dupré 2013). In other words, Mandarin has become the dominant language of Taiwan. Following the normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and the prc in 1979, it became obvious to the roc administration –

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and by extension the kmt – that Taiwan could only retain its legitimacy and sovereignty through regime change. As a result, there was no crackdown when dissidents, many of whom had been persecuted during martial law, created an official opposition party – the dpp – in 1986. Most dpp members were native Taiwanese of Hoklo origin seeking to do away with the kmt ’s “internal-colonialism” and the mainlander-dominated ethnic hierarchy. The party therefore played a major role in exposing the kmt ’s Chinese cultural hegemony and promoting the Taiwanization movement. In 1987, martial law was lifted, paving the way for progressive democratization. In an effort to garner legitimacy among the Taiwanese electorate, the kmt nominated Lee Teng-hui, a native Taiwanese, as president. Lee further consolidated the impetus toward Taiwanization by progressively replacing some of the long-term mainland members of the executive and the legislature with native Taiwanese. In 1996, Lee became Taiwan’s first directly elected president amid a campaign highly charged on the identity issue. Though he represented the kmt , Taiwan’s main pro-unification party,⁶ Lee had his own agenda. In 1999, at the end of his last term, he publicly supported the idea of a Two-State Theory by characterizing prc -roc relations as a special stateto-state relationship, which the prc and many Taiwanese interpreted as support for Taiwan independence. Domestically, he aimed to foster such support by promoting a civic and multicultural identity, yet one partly centred on elements of indigenous culture, including local Taiwanese languages. Lee’s civic ideal was expressed in his concept of a “community of shared fate” (Chang 2006, 189) and “New Taiwanese,” which encompassed all Taiwanese citizens irrespective of their ethnolinguistic backgrounds. Lee’s movement was largely successful, as Taiwanese identity grew drastically during his presidency and now constitutes the largest identity category (see below). In 2000, dpp presidential candidate Chen Shui-bian transformed his party into a viable option for the median voter by espousing a new middle route in which a vote for the dpp did not necessarily imply a vote for political independence, prc provocation, or political instability. In March of that year, Chen took advantage of a split in the kmt and was elected as president of the roc with just 39.3 per cent of the popular vote, ending over fifty years of kmt political domination. Lee was ousted from the kmt and went on to create the Taiwan Solidarity Union (tsu ), a more radically pro-independence party than the dpp . However, the Pan-Green⁷

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(dpp and tsu ) only gathered one hundred of the legislature’s 225 seats after the 2001 legislative election. Chen nonetheless controversially nominated a dpp premier, thus forming a minority government. Chen was re-elected by a narrow margin in 2004, and the Pan-Green managed to seize a larger share of the legislature, though it remained a minority. In the meantime, the kmt was again transforming itself. Lee’s departure from leadership was followed by the party’s re-Sinicization as it returned to its China-centred cultural ideology while re-engaging the prc . Capitalizing on economic opportunities in the Chinese market, it sold itself as a prostatus-quo party while advocating closer economic ties with China. What do these political developments imply for Taiwanese identity? Democratization has brought dramatic changes on the identity front. National identity has traditionally been measured through two proxies in Taiwan: identification as either or both Taiwanese and Chinese, and preferences on Taiwan’s political status (de jure independence, de jure unification with China, or the status quo), which I term “national envisioning.” The percentage of people who identify as “Taiwanese only” increased drastically during Lee’s presidency and after, from 17.6 in 1992 to 53.7 per cent in 2012 (Election Study Center 2012). On the other hand, “Chinese-only” identity holders declined from 25.5 to 3.1 per cent over the same period. Dual “Taiwanese-Chinese” identity was relatively stable, though there has been a slight decrease from a high of 47.7 per cent in 2004 to 39.6 per cent in 2012. As for national envisioning, support for de jure independence has been on the rise in the past few decades. While only 4.3 per cent supported “independence as soon as possible” in 2012, 15.3 per cent, nearly double the 1994 percentage, supported “status quo maintenance with a move toward independence” (Election Study Center 2012). More importantly, the percentage of those who want to “maintain status quo indefinitely” grew from 9.8 per cent in 1994 to 29.4 per cent in 2012. Similarly, 33.8 per cent favoured “maintaining status quo, deciding at a later date” in 2012. Since status quo can be considered a form of de facto independence, I can posit that a vast majority of the population favours independence of some kind, or at least is overwhelmingly against incorporation into the prc . This data suggests that there is a stabilizing identity equilibrium toward a Taiwanese identity in present-day Taiwan. However, as the high proportion of dual identity and the complexity of cross-Strait relations show, the present equilibrium still comprises a strong Chinese cultural element and verges toward the political status quo. While the political spectrum

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in Taiwan is still largely grounded in the national identity issue, this ambiguous equilibrium further pushes parties to converge toward the middle and appeal to constituencies that are neither predominantly ethnic nor radically national-identity based. If the kmt under Lee was the first party to de-radicalize its ideology, the dpp ’s recent transformation into a viable option for the median voter required it to take an ambiguous stance on ethnic and national identities – therefore adopting an ethnic underbidding strategy. The kmt , meanwhile, has had the upper hand by advocating prudence in international affairs and the maintenance of the political and cultural status quo. As I show in the coming section, Taiwan’s population has supported Taiwanization, but has been more ambivalent toward de-Sinicization. This dynamic has resulted in the continuation of Chinese cultural hegemony – including Mandarin dominance – and translated into the formulation of broad linguistic policies geared at reviving the weakest Taiwanese languages and largely devoid of a strong counter-hegemonic identity component. LI NGUI S T I C NO R MA LI ZAT I O N : CO N ST R A I N TS UNDE R DP P GOV E R N A N CE

Despite the important developments in Taiwanese identity that occurred in the democratization period, relatively little was achieved in terms of language policy under Lee’s presidency. A new subject called Knowing Taiwan was introduced into the junior high school curriculum (Chang 2006, 191), and the provision of an optional weekly hour of local language education to the primary school curriculum was permitted for Grades 3 and above in 1997. However, these courses were designed as general local culture rather than language classes per se, and in the eyes of language revivalists offer little in terms of language acquisition and retention. The election of Chen’s dpp government provided an unprecedented opportunity to change the language regime in favour of local languages. But just like Lee’s kmt , Chen’s dpp achieved little in terms of language policy. The most ambitious developments in language policy under Chen occurred in the realm of local language education. In September 2001, soon after the beginning of his presidency, the previously optional local Taiwanese languages became part of the mandatory school curriculum for Grades 1 to 9. While implemented under Chen’s presidency, the policy was in fact announced in the summer of 1999 under Lee’s presidency. Under

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the new curriculum, students spend one forty-minute period per week on local languages, usually Taiwanese. However, partly because of unresolved issues regarding language standardization and teacher accreditation, the new regulation has not substantially enhanced the efficiency of these courses as far as language acquisition, spread, and reversal are concerned (Tsao 2008, 289). The standardization issue, particularly with regard to the selection and development of official romanization systems, was controversial and was characterized by both intra- and inter-party discord. Another prominent linguistic development under Chen was the Ministry of Education’s release of an official online Mandarin-Taiwanese dictionary in October 2008, a project that began in July 2001. While these steps constitute a departure from the period of kmt dictatorship, they did not alter the Mandarin-dominated language regime in significant ways. In March 2002, some tsu legislators proposed recognizing Taiwanese as Taiwan’s second official language. The proposal initially gathered some support from the dpp , including from party whip (and famed novelist) Wang Tuoh. However, this support was far from unconditional. Wang himself admitted that Taiwanese had to be further standardized before it could effectively fulfil the role of official language (China Post 2002). The Pan-Blue (led by the kmt ) was especially vocal in its opposition. Aside from raising practical issues, opposition legislators depicted the proposal as an example of Hoklo chauvinism (fulao shawenzhuyi). Similarly, kmt legislator Apollo Chen deplored the fact that Hakka and aboriginal languages were being left out (Straits Times 2002, 1), while Taipei mayor and current president Ma Ying-jeou, also from the kmt , suggested that if Taiwanese was to be official, all other Taiwanese languages should be as well (Channel News Asia 2002). In other words, the kmt portrayed Taiwanese as an ethnic language that, unlike Mandarin, could not serve as a common public language. A public opinion poll carried out by the tvbs Poll Center (2002) provides the best available assessment of popular support for Taiwanese co-officialization at the time.⁸ When asked, “Recently some people have promoted the officialization of Taiwanese; do you agree with this proposal?,” only 48 per cent agreed, while 37 per cent disagreed and 16 per cent had no opinion (data rounded in original source). This data suggests that there was little public support for Taiwanese co-officialization. To disaggregate the data along ethnolinguistic lines, only 54 per cent of Hoklo fa-

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voured Taiwanese co-officialization, while 54 and 58 per cent of Hakka and mainlanders, respectively, opposed it. The survey also found that 69 per cent of dpp supporters favoured Taiwanese co-officialization, while 45 per cent and 71 per cent of kmt and New Party (a minor and more radically pro-unification party) supporters, respectively, opposed it. The more surprising results of the survey were arguably about English officialization. To the question, “Should the government add an official language to Mandarin, between Taiwanese and English, which language would you prefer to become co-official?,” 60 per cent selected English (a majority in all ethnolinguistic and party groups), while only 31 per cent selected Taiwanese. This suggests that most people were more concerned with language utility (English being seen as an essential international language) than with local language officialization. The dpp was quick to capitalize on the issue. In 2002, Chen suggested that English could be made a semi-official language, a proposal that was included in the Challenge 2008 six-year development plan. The co-officialization movement, with its focus on either Taiwanese or English, was short-lived. The idea that remained, though, was the kmt ’s proposal that any changes to the official language regime should include not only Taiwanese but also all other Taiwanese languages. This gave the dpp the opportunity to push for an electoral promise it had made to the Hakka in 2000, consisting in drafting a language equality law. The Language Equality Law (lel , yuyan pingdengfa) was drafted by the newly renamed National Languages Committee, whose mandate now centred on standardizing and revitalizing local Taiwanese languages, and was endorsed by the executive in February 2003. Comprising twenty-five articles, it was “specially drafted so as to uphold and safeguard the rights of domestic ethnic groups to use their native languages in their everyday life and in participating in public affairs such as politics, the economy, religion, education and culture” (lel , article 1, my translation). In order to achieve this aim, it proposed making all recognized aboriginal languages, together with Taiwanese (Southern Min), Hakka, and Mandarin, national languages (lel , article 3). While the dpp and the tsu generally supported the draft, opposition parties largely opposed it. Apollo Chen complained that such a law would create unnecessary communication problems, a criticism that was frequently voiced in public debates on the law proposal (Taipei Times 2003). Interestingly, it was partly the kmt that had pushed toward ethnic underbidding and a multilingual formula at the time of the Taiwanese

Mandarin State Tradition and Change in Taiwan | 163

co-officialization movement. Strong criticism from opposition parties drove Premier Yu Shyi-kun to plead for further review before passing the lel to the kmt -dominated legislature for readings and voting. From 16 to 18 October 2004, the National Central Library held a conference on Multiethnic and Multicultural Development (Hong 2004). In an address, President Chen Shui-bian promoted the adoption of the lel , and attendees called for the discontinuation of the term “Taiwanese” to refer to the Southern Min language (Hong 2004). This was meant to address the Hakka community’s concerns that designating Southern Min “Taiwanese” implied that other languages, such as Hakka, were not legitimate Taiwanese languages. Chen also suggested that Mandarin should remain the only de facto official language following the adoption of a law making all of Taiwan’s languages national languages (Hong 2004). The dpp ’s efforts at recognizing minority ethnolinguistic rights appear to have paid off: following its second electoral success, the dpp indicated that it had more Hakka support (M. Chang 2004). This information was corroborated by the kmt , which also indicated that it had won only 40 per cent of the Hoklo vote (Y. Chang 2004). On 20 March 2007, Premier Su Tseng-chang indicated that the Executive Yuan had resumed working on a language law, the National Languages Development Law (nldl , guojia yuyan fazhanfa). While the executive approved the draft only on 16 May 2007, much of the parliamentary debate it generated was voiced in late March of that year. The bill resembled a much shorter, nine-article version of the lel , and still stated, “all the native languages used by domestic ethnic groups should be recognized as equal national languages” (nldl Preamble, my translation). Although the draft did not deal with the official language issue, a substantial part of the debates surrounding it focused on Mandarin’s status and designation. In fact, since all Taiwanese languages were to be recognized as national languages, Mandarin could no longer exert its monopoly on the term Guoyu (national language) as it had for decades under the roc ’s state tradition. Some suggested renaming Mandarin as Pekinese (Beijinghua) or Chinese (huayu), which raised the suspicion that the dpp was trying to portray Mandarin as a foreign language so as to “de-Mandarinize” (quguoyuhua) and “de-Sinicize” (quzhongguohua) Taiwan. The nldl was shelved indefinitely as the kmt won supermajorities in the 2008 and 2012 elections. Ethnolinguistic issues, however, remained on the table. In a bid to gain Hakka votes in the 2008 elections, Ma, then a presidential candidate,

164 | Jean-François Dupré

promised to set up a Hakka radio channel and double subsidies for Hakka events over four years (China Post 2007). In January 2010, the Ma administration passed the Hakka Basic Law (kejia jibenfa), with Article 6 promising the creation of “Hakka culture development districts” (kejia wenhua fazhanqu) in areas where the Hakka account for at least one third of the population. This article specifies that in these regions, the status of Hakka as “language of public affairs” (gongshi yuyan) will be strengthened. Moreover, the Council of Indigenous Peoples has recently started to push for an Aboriginal Languages Development Law (yuanzhumin yuyan fazhanfa). Originally drafted under the dpp in 2002, this law had been shelved to make way for the pan-ethnic lel in 2003 and the nldl in 2007. Lastly, in 2009, the kmt government greatly reduced the budget of the National Languages Committee, and in 2013 it lowered its status within the Ministry of Education hierarchy. The committee was formally abolished in 2014. The committee had increasingly focused on local language standardization and revitalization work, and its abolition by the kmt can be interpreted as an attempt to curb these efforts. It appears the kmt has been moderately supportive of measures that do not require renaming Mandarin, displacing it from its privileged status, or giving Taiwanese – the majority ethnic language – equal footing. In this context, changes to the consolidated Mandarin language regime can only be limited to the revitalization of Taiwan’s weakest languages, that is, Hakka and aboriginal languages. C ON C LUS I ON

The Taiwanese case represents the logic of language and identity change in different political frameworks and state traditions: Japanese colonialism, Chinese nationalism under kmt authoritarianism, and a “Taiwanizing” democracy. Linguistic regimes in Taiwan have been shaped by cultural entrepreneurs trying to gather support for their political ideology by reinforcing a sense of shared origins and destiny among the local population. President Lee Teng-hui has played a major role in initiating a cascade toward a Taiwanese identity, a trend that dpp President Chen Shui-bian pursued. However, while there has been a shift toward a Taiwanese identity, this identity has been imbued with a strong Chinese cultural component and expressed through a desire for the continuation of political status quo (neither unification nor independence). Therefore, parties have had to

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design subtle cultural policies that can capture the large share of middle voters while appealing to ethnolinguistic minorities. The dynamics of language regime change in present-day Taiwan largely reside in the fields of ethnic conflict, national identity, and party politics. However, the failure to normalize local Taiwanese languages also has to do with the enduring state tradition of Mandarin unilingualism. Originally part of the kmt ’s re-Sinicization programme, Mandarin today is considered a neutral lingua franca and is increasingly a first language no less legitimate than Taiwanese or other local languages in expressing Taiwan’s civic national identity. As a matter of fact, attempts to raise the status of Taiwanese as co-official language have failed, largely because the language is seen as that of the Hoklo ethnic majority rather than one that can express the identity of all Taiwanese ethnolinguistic groups. In this context, Taiwanese could at best be promoted as a national language equal to that of other Taiwanese ethnic groups. With little public support and the kmt ’s unwillingness to reverse the present linguistic hierarchy, substantial changes to Taiwan’s language regime are unlikely. Mandarin lies at the core of an increasingly diversified yet stable language regime. Language regime outcomes in Taiwan may have important implications for our understanding of Sinitic language revival and regime change in the whole of the greater China region. The Mandarin-only policy that was enforced during the kmt dictatorship shared many features with the current prc Mandarin (known as Putonghua or “common language”) policy. To the extent that Taiwan can be imagined as a province of China, current politico-linguistic dynamics in the territory provide an experimental ground from which to speculate on future language outcomes in the prc . Recent cultural developments in Taiwan show that Sinitic languages (often portrayed as dialects) can acquire important political significance in the context of democratization and identity politics. Yet, since language revivalists in Taiwan have failed to coordinate on language regime change despite relatively high levels of institutional means and financial support, it appears unlikely that potential revivalists on the mainland would fare better. Therefore, we can expect Mandarin’s hegemony to strengthen in the Chinese-speaking world, regardless of whether the Chinese and Taiwanese people converge on the national identity issue.

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NOTES

1 I use “normalization” in the sense commonly used in the literature on the regional languages of Spain: to refer to the standardization, officialization, and educational promotion of an otherwise marginalized regional language. In this chapter, I largely operationalize linguistic normalization and language regime change through language (co-)officialization or recognition as national language, as this has been the dominant issue in Taiwan. 2 The Han are the majority ethnic group of the Greater China Region, including Taiwan. The Han share a number of characteristics relating to lifestyle, spirituality, and writing system, but are also divided into different regional sub-cultures, often on the basis of oral language (often referred to as “dialects”). While Sinitic languages are closely interrelated as part of the Chinese language family and share a similar standard written form, they are by and large mutually unintelligible. The proximity between oral languages could be compared to that between Romance languages such as Catalan, French, Occitan, and Spanish. 3 The Hoklo originally migrated from the Southern Fujian region on the Chinese mainland, and (together with their language) are also commonly referred to as the Holo, Southern Min (Minnan), Hokkien, or Fulao people. 4 Younger generation aboriginals today are largely acculturated to the Han majority. For instance, a study by Chen (2010) suggests that only 50 per cent of people whose mother tongue is an aboriginal language claim to be proficient in it. 5 Coakley (2008, 770) defines ethnic underbidding as “an explicit effort to undermine ethnic polarisation by mobilising the possibly unstable terrain between the two blocs.” It is contrasted to ethnic outbidding, defined as “a spiralling process of intra-bloc competition in which … each [party] claims to be the effective defender of bloc interests” (769). For a similar typology, see Zuber (2011). 6 While in recent years the kmt appears to have shelved its claims of sovereignty over the mainland, it has continued to advocate re-unification with China. 7 Taiwanese political parties are generally located on a Blue-Green ideological continuum. Blue (represented by the kmt ) refers to a pro-China or pro-unification ideology, and Green (represented by the dpp ) corresponds to a pro-Taiwan or pro-independence ideology. 8 Survey conducted on 12 March 2002 of 836 respondents aged twenty and up, 95 per cent confidence interval, sampling error 3.4 per cent. While tvbs is generally known as leaning Blue, the results are largely congruent with statistical analyses made by the author using the Taiwan Social Change Survey 2003, Academia Sinica Institute of Sociology (see Dupré 2013).

Mandarin State Tradition and Change in Taiwan | 167

REFERENCES

Chang, Bi-Yu. 2006. “Constructing the Motherland: Culture and the State in Taiwan.” In What Has Changed? Taiwan Before and After the Change in Ruling Parties, edited by Dafydd Fell, Henning Klöter and Bi-Yu Chang, 187–206. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Chang, Maubo. 2004. “kmt Fails to Win Majority of Hoklo Votes: kmt Officials.” Central News Agency, 7 April. Chang, Yun-ping. 2004. “dpp Using Anniversary to Vie for Hakkas.” Taipei Times, 4 July. http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2004/07/04/ 2003177617. Channel News Asia. 2002. “Taiwan’s tsu Party Pushes Controversial Dialect Issue.” 15 March. Chen, Su-Chiao. 2010. “Multilingualism in Taiwan.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 205: 79–104. China Post. 2002. “tsu Hokkien Proposal Sparks Angry Language.” 11 March. http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/detail.asp?ID=24138&GRP=B. – 2007. “Ma Seeking Hakka Votes, Promises More Spending.” 26 September. http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/2007/09/26/124070/Ma-seeking.htm. Coakley, John. 2008. “Ethnic Competition and the Logic of Party System Transformation.” European Journal of Political Research 47: 766–93. Council for Cultural Affairs (Republic of China). 2007. National Languages Development Law Draft [guojia yuyan fazhanfa caoan]. Dupré, Jean-François. 2013. “In Search of Linguistic Identities in Taiwan: An Empirical Study.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 34: 431–44. Election Study Center. 2012. “Data Archive Trends in Core Political Attitudes among the Taiwanese.” National Chengchi University. Accessed 9 April 2013. http://esc.nccu.edu.tw/english/modules/tinyd2/index.php?id=6. Hakka Affairs Council. 2010. Hakka Basic Law. [Kejia jibenfa]. http://law.moj.gov.tw/Eng/LawClass/LawAll.aspx?PCode=D0140005. Her, One-Soon. 2009. “Language and Group Identity: On Taiwan Mainlanders’ Mother Tongues and Taiwan Mandarin.” Language and Linguistics 10 (2): 375–419. Hong, Caroline. 2004. “Law Recognizing All Languages Urged.” Taipei Times, 17 October. http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2004/10/17/ 2003207230. Hsiau, A-Chin. 2000. Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism. New York: Routledge. Laitin, David D. 1992. Language Repertoire and State Construction in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Lamley, Harry. 1981. “Subethnic Rivalry in the Ch’ing Period.” In The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society, edited by Emily Martin Ahern and Hill Gates, 282–318. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ministry of Education (Republic of China). 2003. Languages Equality Law Draft [yuyanpingdengfa caoan]. Straits Times. 2002. “Taipei Party Pushes for Hokkien as an Official Language.” 12 March. Taipei Times. 2003. “Draft Law Would Allow Testimony in Local Languages.” 19 February. http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2003/02/19/ 0000195095. Tsao, Feng-fu. 2008. “The Language Planning Situation in Taiwan: An Update.” In Language Planning and Policy in Asia. Vol. 1, Japan, Nepal and Taiwan and Chinese Characters, edited by Robert B. Kaplan and Richard B. Baldauf Jr, 285–300. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. tvbs Poll Center. 12 March 2002. “Public Opinion Survey on Listing Taiwanese as Second Official Language” [Taiyu lieru di-er guanfang yuyan mindiao]. Accessed 9 April 2013. http://www.tvbs.com.tw/code/tvbsnews/poll/2002-03/20020318/ 020318.asp. Zuber, Christina Isabel. 2011. “Beyond Outbidding? Ethnic Party Strategies in Serbia.” Party Politics 19 (5): 758–77.

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9 State Tradition and Regional Languages in France: The Case of Basque¹ J E A N - BA P TI S T E H AR G U IN D ÉG U Y AND X AB IER ITÇ AINA

“One state, one nation, one language” (Judge 2000): France, if compared with its European neighbours, would be a paradigmatic case of cultural centralization. However, the process of cultural homogenization has not been completely achieved, since most regional languages in France persist – sometimes with very few speakers – more than two centuries after this process began (Poignant 1998; Cerquiglini 2003). This sociolinguistic resistance has been aided by a slight and discrete shift toward more tolerant and flexible linguistic policies. Regional and sub-regional activists, helped by sociolinguistic experts and also by local political elites, have reframed their demands in terms of minority rights and have contributed to the emerging institutionalization of regional languages as a policy sector. The case of Euskera (the Basque language) is a good example of this. As defined by article 1 of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (Council of Europe 1992), Euskera is a regional language, that is, “a tongue traditionally used within a given territory of a State by nationals of that State who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the State’s population; and different from the official language(s) of that State.” Along with Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian, Euskera is one of the rare nonIndo-European vernacular languages still spoken in the European Union. It is essentially used in the Basque Country, an area located between the Atlantic coast and the Pyrénées that divides into a Spanish side, Hegoalde (“Southern part”) and a French side, Iparralde (“Northern part”). Indeed, the main interest of Euskera as a case study lies in the ongoing efforts for its recognition organized on both sides of the Pyrenean border.

Over the last thirty-five years, analysis of France’s language regime has generated a consistent literature in different academic fields. Sociolinguists have focused on how the promotion of French converted the rest of the vernacular languages into minority languages (Clairis et al. 1999; Blanchet et al. 1999). Sociologists have focused on the symbolic violence mechanisms produced by the imposition of French on non-French speakers, and on the rise of regional language militancy after 1968 (Bourdieu 1982; Touraine et al. 1981). Political scientists have analyzed French regional language policy (Rochas 2009) and the new framework that decentralization provided for ethnolinguistic entrepreneurs (Loughlin 1985; Cole and Loughlin 2003; Harguindéguy and Cole 2009). While many authors have tackled the subject of Hegoalde language politics (Linz et al. 1986; Tejerina 1999; Mezo 2008),² research on linguistic policy toward Euskera in France only started in the mid-2000s (Ahedo Gurrutxaga 2004; Coyos 2004, 2008; Urteaga 2004; Amado Borthayre 2006; Baxok and Coyos 2010). In this chapter, we raise two interconnected questions: first, under what conditions did the language policy for promoting Euskera appear in France? Second, what does this case say about the French language regime and its alleged hostility toward regional languages? In order to answer these questions, we analyze two sets of variables. The role played by endogenous factors such as the state-legal polity, centre-periphery relationships, the process of local empowerment, the creation of territorial coalitions for pressing a common issue, and the change in collective action methods must be highlighted. The rise of Basque cross-border cooperation should also be considered an additional variable. Since the 1980s, cross-border cooperation has been fundamental for understanding the impetus of Euskera policy entrepreneurs, since most of them received organizational, financial, and political support from their Spanish Basque counterparts. Regarding the more general question of the regime that governs regional languages in France, we intend to demonstrate the gap between the Jacobin ethos that rules the central French polity and the flexible local arrangements between pro-Euskera entrepreneurs, territorial institutions, and state representatives. This chapter is divided into two sections. In the first section, we present the evolution of Euskera policy in France, while in the second we focus on the variables that explain such a language policy. We conclude with an overall assessment of the analysis presented here.

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L A NGUA GE P OLI CY FO R EU SK ER A I N F R A N CE

The late 1990s saw the rise of a specific language policy for promoting Euskera in Iparralde. This language policy cannot be compared to other language planning programs, such as the promotion of French in Quebec or Modern Hebrew in Israel, in terms of scope. However, it represents an important milestone in France toward a new deal for regional languages. Initially based on a set of fragmented civil society initiatives, this policy has been progressively institutionalized. The most striking feature of Euskera language policy in France is that it generated some change in specific niches, such as immersion education, while others, such as local administration in particular, remain mostly French. In Spain, Euskera is used in the autonomous communities of Euskadi (which encompasses the provinces of Gipuzkoa, Bizkaia, and Araba) and Navarre. In France, it is spoken in the Western part of the PyrénéesAtlantiques department (département), which is itself a sub-division of the Aquitaine region. Pyrénées-Atlantiques was founded after the French Revolution in 1790. It joined the ancien régime province of Béarn, an Occitan-speaking area, to the three Euskera-speaking provinces (Zuberoa, Benafarroa, and Lapurdi). This territorial reform aimed to avoid autonomist and clerical-monarchist claims. As in Spain, the borders between these provinces delimit more or less three dialectal areas of Basque. Nevertheless, standardization was vigorously attempted through the creation of Batua (standardized Basque) by the Euskaltzaindia (Royal Academy of the Basque Language, created in 1919) during the conference of Arantzazu in 1968. The highest percentage of Euskera speakers (in 2011) can be found, in descending order, in Euskadi, Iparralde, and Navarre (Viceconsejería de Política Lingüística 2012). Iparralde is losing older speakers (over sixtyfive), who represent 30.6 per cent of the total speakers in the hinterland. But the number of new young speakers (under twenty-five) is growing, thanks to the promotion of Euskera in the education system. As expected, the mother tongue of a majority (75 per cent) of Iparralde inhabitants is French, and French is used in 77 per cent of social interactions such as business, family, administration, and so on. This is especially true on the Basque coast, where a high number of newcomers from the rest of France have settled since the middle of the 1990s (tables 9.1 and 9.2). Surveys also emphasize the strong correlation between the feeling of Basque identity

172 | Jean-Baptiste Harguindéguy and Xabier Itçaina

Table 9.1 | Propo ion of Euskera speakers in Spain, 2011 REGION

BILINGUAL

PASSIVE

NON-EUSKERA

TOTAL

BILINGUAL

SPEAKERS

INHABITANTS

Hegoalde

27.0%

13.38%

57.46%

2,410,637

Euskadi

32.0%

17.4%

50.6%

1,873,498

Bizkaia

25.4%

17.8%

56.8%

999,228

Gipuzkoa

49.9%

16.4%

33.7%

602,206

Araba

16.8%

16.8%

66.4%

272,064

Navarre

11.7%

7.5%

80.7%

537,139

Source: Viceconsejería de Política Lingüística (2012)

Table 9.2 | Propo ion of Euskera speakers in France, 2011 AREA

BILINGUAL

PASSIVE

NON-EUSKERA

TOTAL

BILINGUAL

SPEAKERS

INHABITANTS OVER SIXTEEN

Iparralde

21.4%

9.1%

69.4%

239,000

Lapurdi (coast)

8.7%

6.0%

85.3%

99,000

Lapurdi (hinterland)

23.9%

10.5%

65.6%

107,000

Zuberoa/ Benafarroa

52.1%

14.1%

33.9%

32,582

Source: Viceconsejería de Política Lingüística (2012)

and Euskera-speaking ability (Baxok et al. 2006; Viceconsejería de Política Lingüística 2012; Itçaina 2010). Until the mid-1990s, the promotion of Euskera in France was essentially based on civil society mobilization. Civil society organizations were extremely active in the field of education. One of the first initiatives came from the Church and was implemented by Mons Gieure, Bishop of Bayonne, who organized pioneering Euskera classes in Catholic schools between 1923 and 1933. This period also saw the development of Euskera

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writing competitions in schools under the aegis of the cross-border association Euskalzaleen Biltzarra, founded in 1901. In 1951, the Deixonne Act made possible Euskera courses three hours a week in public schools. The Haby Law confirmed this model in 1975. Nevertheless, at that time, the use of French in business and in mass media became compulsory with the BasAuriol regulation. This rigid framework became progressively more flexible in 1982 and again in 1995 through the launch of the Regional Culture and Language curriculum in public schools. In 21 June 1982, the Savary decree allowed the teaching of regional languages and cultures (from preschool to university) and the opening of experimental bilingual programs in public schools. Regional language teaching was then extended to private schools (predominantly Catholics), which were under contract with the state. Meanwhile, immersion schools in Euskera (ikastolak) started in 1969 in the Basque Country. They were followed in the 1980s by the Ikas-bi (Learn-two) and Euskal Haziak (Basque roots) associations, which created two networks of bilingual classes in public and private Catholic schools, respectively. At the university level, bilingual students were also able to access the complete curriculum in Basque studies proposed by the Universities of Pau and Bordeaux (Harguindéguy and Itçaina 2012). The ikastolak managed by the Seaska federation were officially recognized as private schools under contract with the Ministry of National Education in 1992 (Jacob 1994; Borthayrou et al. 2005).³ Adults can also learn Euskera thanks to the Alfabetatze Euskalduntze Koordinakundea (aek , Coordination for Alphabetization in Euskera), which organizes classes and immersion training sessions in Euskadi (Oronos 2002; Oronos et al. 2008; Garat and Aire 2009). While the presence of Euskera in schools is a substantial one, its existence outside of the classroom is much less noticeable. It has limited public use, even if some is possible (for instance, in postal addresses and road names). It also has little presence in private business. In media, the main French public radio and television networks, such as France Bleu Pays Basque and France 3, broadcast some news reports from their reporters located in Bayonne. Private associative radio stations such as Irulegiko Irratia in Benafarroa, Xiberoko Botza in Zuberoa, and Gure Irratia in Lapurdi have also broadcast almost exclusively in Euskera since the early 1980s. In addition, the French-Basque audience can access the programs of Euskal Telebista 1 and 2 – the Spanish-Basque public channels managed by the Euskadi government. A large majority of Iparralde’s newspapers

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are written in French. Nonetheless, there are some exceptions, such as the weekly Christian-Democrat Herria, or the daily cross-border Berria. Some cross-border newspapers and publishing companies disseminate pertinent material in Euskera despite a relatively small market of Euskera-speaking readers in France (Oronos et al. 2008). E X P L A I NI N G TH E N E W B A SQ U E L A N G U A G E POLICY (1990–2 012 )

Research in the area of regional studies (Cole and Loughlin 2003) usually emphasizes a common set of variables to explain successful territorial mobilization: the state-legal polity, centre-periphery relationships, the process of local empowerment, the creation of territorial coalitions, and the changing repertoires of collective action. In the case of Euskera language policy in France, cross-border cooperation should be added to the list. In other words, the Spanish-Basque actors’ support would have partially compensated for the French-Basque actors’ institutional weaknesses. France’s Centralist Tradition

In contrast to those states that maintain an ad hoc and tolerance-based language regime (like the United States)⁴ and those that promote actively threatened languages (like Belgium, Canada, or Spain), France follows a republican tradition by supporting just one language. This republican credo is supposed to facilitate all citizens’ political participation. Such an institutional path goes back to the Villers-Cotterêts decree of 1539, which substituted Latin for French in the royal administration (Elias 1982). During the 1789 Revolution, an ambitious program of language centralization was undertaken. French became the symbol of modernity, while regional languages were relegated to the aristocracy and the Church under the pejorative name of patois. However, it was not until the Third Republic (1870–1940) that language unification became effective. The Ferry laws of 1881 and 1882 banned vernacular languages from public schools. Catechism in vernacular languages was forbidden in 1903, the rise of a modern capitalist market provoked huge migration flows, and mass media spread news from Paris across the country. Military conscription completed the language centralization process by mixing male populations during World War i (Weber 1976). The reaction of the Church in peripheral Catholic regions (like the Basque Country or Brittany), which

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opposed both secularization and centralization, associated Catholic identity with regional languages. In the 1920s, the atmosphere was less hostile to regional languages in France, especially once Léon Bérard, himself from Béarn and close to the Occitan Félibrée cultural movement, became the minister of public instruction (in 1919 and again from 1921 to 1924). But the first measures to promote regional languages in France – even if very weakly implemented – were imposed by the Maréchal Pétain government during the German occupation in the 1940s. This historical episode – along with the collaboration of some Breton and Alsatian nationalists with the Nazis – delegitimized the protection of many regional languages after the Libération (Barral 1974). In 1992 the sentence “the language of the Republic is French” was added to article 2 of the constitution, and in 1994 positive action measures for promoting French over English came into force through the Toubon Law. In spite of this hostile environment, about seventy-five vernacular languages are still spoken in France. Among them, at least one-third are used in metropolitan France.⁵ These languages face an ambiguous situation: although tolerated by representative institutions at the local level, they are not recognized explicitly at the national level. The General Delegation for the French Language (part of the Ministry of Culture) was converted to the General Delegation for the French Language and Languages of France in 2001, with no significant impact on the national language policy. On 21 July 2008, following a heated debate, the French Parliament added the sentence “regional languages are part of France’s heritage” to the 1958 Constitution (Article 75-1). On 7 May 1999, the French government also signed the 1992 Charter for Regional and Minority Languages promoted by the Council of Europe (Wright 2000). However, this charter was not ratified due to the opposition of the Constitutional Council on 15 June 1999 (Journal Officiel du Sénat 2010; 2011). Toward a New Centre-Periphery Relationship

To a large extent, the current Euskera language policy is a side effect of the process of decentralization that the central state began in the early 1980s. In 1982, the recently elected President Mitterrand decided to transfer new competencies and resources to the twenty-five newly created regional councils (conseils régionaux), the one hundred older departmental councils (conseils généraux), and the 36,680 city councils. Decentralization allowed for a new style of territorial governance in the French Basque 176 | Jean-Baptiste Harguindéguy and Xabier Itçaina

Country. Despite the criticisms of Mansvelt Beck (2005), who calls this process “cosmetic decentralization,” and of Letamendia (1997), who affirms it did not compensate for the non-creation of a specific Basque department, the decentralization policy profoundly restructured the power balance in Pyrénées-Atlantiques. This process was based on two components. The first one was the constitution of the “pays” Pays Basque in 1997. The pays refers to a new administrative division created by the Law on Territorial Planning of 1995 (Loi du 4 février 1995 d’orientation pour l’aménagement et le développement du territoire) for promoting territorial socio-economic development and social cohesion through existing networks of private companies, associations, and local authorities. The Basque Country stakeholders were among the first to develop their own pays, delineated by Basque provinces’ borders. The compromise between state representatives, local public figures, and civil society actors favoured the launch of different organizations like the Country Development Council (an advisory agency for local development) in 1994 and the Council for Elected Representatives in 1995, along with the Intermunicipal Community for Basque Culture, which comprised 143 city councils (Chaussier 1996; Ahedo Gurrutxaga 2005). This experience allowed the rapprochement of local economic, social, and political actors. Secondly, the institutionalization of the French Basque Country was not simply the product of Basque pressure, but was rather the result of a cross-party compromise between the Socialist Party, the French centre-right in the hinterland and coastal areas, Green local leaders, and Basque moderate nationalists. As a result, the newly created French Basque territorial institutions had an impact on language policy, and thus empowered local actors and enhanced public-private institutional cooperation. The Empowerment Process of Local Actors

The current linguistic-cultural policy in the French Basque Country is the product of a change in territorial governance that started in the late 1980s. Paradoxically, this change was pushed by the representative of the central state in the department – the prefect (préfet) – who initiated a series of consultations among actors from very different backgrounds, namely Basque nationalists and non-nationalists, civil society associations, and elected representatives. In 1984, at the beginning of this process, the departmental council opened the Centre Culturel du Pays Basque (ccpb , Cultural centre for State Tradition and Regional Languages in France | 177

the Basque Country) in order to foster the production and distribution of cultural material. This posed the question of what “Basque culture” meant in that context – for example, was it all cultural material in Euskera? All cultural material produced in the Basque Country? However, the mobilization of nationalist associations and language activists against this formula caused the ccpb ’s split in 1988. This division gave rise to the Centre d’Action Culturelle de Bayonne et du Sud-Aquitaine (Centre for cultural activity of Bayonne and South-Aquitaine) and to the Institut Culturel Basque (Basque cultural institute). While the former was a “generalist” cultural centre (in French and Euskera), the latter specialized in Basque cultural matters (Laborde 1999). Hence, at that time Euskera was promoted by a semi-public organization (the institute), by public and/or private educational associations for teaching it in schools (Seaska, Ikas-bi, and Euskal Haziak), and by the associative network (aek , among others). The fragmentation of policy actors considerably slowed down the decisionmaking process, thus allowing pro-Euskera institutional actors and activists to ask for the constitution of a consistent institutional leadership to promote the language. At the same time, the departmental prefect decided to organize a series of meetings with two main objectives. The first was pacification through the promotion of political deliberation concerning local development, after a decade of violence perpetrated by nationalist terrorist groups like Euskadi ta Askatasuna (Basque Country and liberty), Iparretarrak (“those of the North”), and the squads of the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación (Anti-terrorist liberation groups). The second consisted of proposing alternative models of territorial accommodation to those demanding a Basque department. As a consultation process open to activist circles, this multilateral process had profound effects on language policy. As previously mentioned, the French Basque Country authorities established a pays in 1997. As a result, the first territorial contract with this pays was signed in 1997 between local and regional authorities and the state, and a Specific Agreement for the Basque Country (Convention spécifique Pays Basque) was ratified among the state, regional, and local authorities for the 2000–06 programming period. This partnership was renewed when a new prospective consultation process (Pays Basque 2020) generated a Territorial Development Plan (Schéma d’aménagement du territoire) and a Territorial Contract on Local Development (Contrat territorial de développement local) between the state and the territorial authorities in 2008. This new form of territorial 178 | Jean-Baptiste Harguindéguy and Xabier Itçaina

governance was largely open to civil society, especially regarding issues usually managed by activist circles. All these private-public contracts also included a language strand. Consequently, aek was officially recognized by the state authorities, subsidies were granted for promoting linguistic programs, new references to sociolinguistic expertise appeared, and in 2001 a new semi-public organization, the Conseil de la Langue Basque (Council for the Basque language), emerged. This council included representatives from the central state, the Aquitaine region, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, and the Council of Elected Representatives. In 2004, the council became the Office Public de la Langue Basque (oplb , Public office for the Basque language) to promote the use of Euskera in society and in the public sphere (Coyos 2004, 2008; Baxok 2008). In 2011, the oplb conducted the first evaluation of its activity. It reported positive results concerning language transmission, specifically regarding bilingualism in childcare, media, the initial linguistic policy at the local municipal level, and, especially, primary education.⁶ Therefore, for the 2010–16 programming period, the oplb (2011, unpublished interview) opted to redirect its efforts toward the social and public uses of language as well as toward its transmission. Territorial Coalitions and Language Issues

In France, the limited politicization of language issues gave a new impetus to the strategic coalitions between representatives of various regional languages. The Fédération pour les Langues Régionales dans l’Enseignement Public (Federation for the teaching of regional languages in public education), whose members mainly come from Alsace, the Basque Country, Brittany, Catalonia, Corsica, and Occitania, aims to promote regional languages in public schools and organizes annual interregional meetings. In addition, representatives from French Basque public and private institutions and networks participated in the Rencontres Interrégionales des Langues et Cultures Régionales (Interregional meetings for regional cultures and languages), which have been held every year since 1990, to demand a new deal for vernacular languages of France. To date, however, these initiatives have had a limited impact on language policy at the national level. In the French Basque Country, the most important territorial coalition fighting for language recognition brings together local public institutions and associative networks via the mediation of the oplb and its advisory State Tradition and Regional Languages in France | 179

council. The oplb ’s presidency was assigned according to an implicit principle of changeover between funding institutions (the Departmental Council, Regional Council, and Intermunicipal Community for the Basque Culture – the state preferred to leave the presidency to the elected officials). Its first president, who served from 2005–11, was a right-wing departmental councillor named Max Brisson; since 2011, François Maitia, a Socialist regional councillor, has held the position. The other important coalition is Hiru sareak (the three networks), which connects the three bilingual and immersion educational networks, namely Seaska, Ikas-bi, and Euskal Haziak. This network grew stronger in the 2000s due to the increasing number of parents who wanted their children to learn Euskera in a suitable educational environment (from 2,907 pupils in 1993 to 6,149 in 2004) (Betbeder 2006). Although official authorities have accepted these organizations as legitimate interlocutors, some outside actors remain at the margins of the institutional debate. This is the case of pro-Euskera associative movements – most of them with a cross-border basis – such as Behatokia (Observatory), Euskararen Gizarte Erakundeen Kontseilua (Council of civil society organizations for the promotion of Basque language), Euskal Konfederazioa (Basque confederation), Euskal Herrian Euskaraz (In Euskera in the Basque Country), and aek . The majority of these organizations remain highly critical of the current trend in language policy. For them, the process of professionalizing the language field – through public authorities’ use of language experts and sociolinguistic data – tends to depoliticize the debate. In particular, aek and the cross-border Euskararen Gizarte Erakundeen Kontseilua still advocate for both the recognition of Euskera as a co-official language by the French state, and also a specific department for the French Basque Country. These are two necessary conditions for any successful language policy, which should also include some mandatory provisions concerning learning and social use (Berria 2009). A Change in the Repeoire of Collective Action

The institutionalization of local actor networks has occurred in parallel with a change in the collective action repertoire. Social activists’ strategies have shifted from the street struggle to the negotiation table with local authorities. The oplb has been especially active in bringing together institutional and extra-institutional actors, and in endorsing tasks (such as

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the promotion of Basque in municipalities) that had until then been led by associations. However, this institutionalization did not prevent most language activists from using such classic repertoires of contention as cross-border rallies (Korrika), marches, and petitions. On 24 October 2009, a huge demonstration called Deiadar (the call) was held in Bayonne, backed by abertzale (Basque nationalist) associations, non-abertzale politicians, and socio-economic milieus, to lobby for official recognition of Euskera as a co-official language. Three years later, in February 2012, Seaska organized a new series of protests looking to allow French students to pass the baccalauréat examination in Euskera. Local protests were also organized against the new territorial institutions that emerged in the late 1990s. In November 2007, Euskal Herrian Euskaraz protested to demand a stronger language policy for making Euskera compulsory in the French Basque Country. In the same vein, in January 2012, Ikas-bi protested against the oplb ’s conversion into a “technocratic” institution (Sud-Ouest 2012b). These spontaneous reactions also reveal the potential fragility of the coalition between the oplb and the three associative networks, due to their distinct ideological backgrounds (Ikas-bi is associated with the French public school, Seaska with Basque nationalism, and Euskal Haziak with social Catholicism). Cross-Border Cooperation as a Driver of the Euskera Policy Institutionalization

In the mid-1990s, a survey about the policy outputs of the AquitaineEuskadi Common Fund – a pioneering regional public joint venture created in 1990 to fund cross-border projects between Aquitaine and Euskadi – indicated that cultural and linguistic projects attracted more actors from Euskadi and the French Basque Country than from the rest of the Aquitaine region (Itçaina et al. 1997). At that time, Basque institutional cooperation was difficult since the Spanish-Basque regional government had no real French-Basque counterpart to deal with. Furthermore, the financial and legal asymmetry between the two regional partners seriously limited the implementation of common projects. However, the new territorial governance pattern inaugurated in the late 1990s allowed the rigid model of the Common Fund to be bypassed. The starting point of this new period was the creation of the pays Pays Basque, before the oplb ’s successive debut. These two organizations provided a

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real institutional counterpart to the regional Government of Euskadi. As a result, a series of agreements were passed between the oplb and the Euskadi government in 2006 regarding the co-funding of language projects stemming from civil society actors, such as the official cross-border recognition of a linguistic diploma, the implementation of cross-border television broadcasts, and the organization of a cross-border sociolinguistic survey every five years (oplb 2011, unpublished interview 2011). Cross-border linguistic relationships generally meant that Hegoalde actors supported the Iparralde ones, at least until the onset of the recent economic crisis. Such backing took two forms: institutional support from Hegoalde public bodies for Iparralde associations, and a cross-border system of help between members of both social movements.⁷ On the one hand, the support the Euskadi government has given the Iparralde associations to date is visible in different fields. It funded the creation of Euskera-speaking media, such as Berria, the television channels Euskal Telebista 1 and 2, and the cross-border radio station Antxeta Irratia. In the same vein, since 1996, it has helped to conduct sociolinguistic surveys on both sides of the border jointly with French Basque and Navarrese authorities or significant cultural associations, such as Eusko Ikaskuntza. The Spanish Basque government also dedicated a specific budget for the Instituto Etxepare in order to manage its foreign cultural policy from 2009 onward. This case of cross-border linguistic social movements is particularly enlightening. These language movements share at least four features: their activity is transnational, their internal decision-making process is horizontal and democratic, most of them depend on Hegoalde financial support, and all of them intend to use European resources to promote Euskera, notably through the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages and the Council of Europe. The learning capacity of these networks is striking. Significantly, in 2009, the ikastola cross-border federation created a European Cooperative Society to make it easier for the Southern and Northern ikastolak to mutually support each other (Villafañez Pérez 2010).⁸ C ON C LUS I ON

Answering the two questions posed in the introduction is clearly a daunting task. As we have demonstrated, Euskera language policy in France has strengthened considerably. Such policy innovation must be considered a novelty within the framework of the Fifth French Republic. The frag182 | Jean-Baptiste Harguindéguy and Xabier Itçaina

mented projects implemented by civil society actors now converge toward a common aim through the leadership of newly created institutions. But how can this change be explained? Endogenous variables like the new French policy toward regional languages, the new institutional capacities reached after decentralization, the new relationship with central state services, the creation of stable territorial coalitions between civil society and local representatives, and the new and more peaceful repertoire of activists’ collective actions are necessary, but not sufficient, to explain the emergence of this language policy. An exogenous variable must be added to the list: the constant cross-border interactions established since the 1980s among Basque actors from France and Spain. The Euskera case attests to a potential change in France’s language regime. Bottom-up mobilizations succeeded in introducing some elements of change (such as article 75-1 of the Constitution). Nevertheless, the essential features of the French political system remain unchanged at the central state level. In August 2011, France’s right-wing government, after some hesitation and a debate in the Senate, confirmed that there would be no bill on regional languages during its mandate. The elements of innovation must be found elsewhere, at the sub-state level where the effects of decentralization have allowed the organization of new territorial governance patterns. In the Euskera case, the iterative process of regional capacity-building generated by state reform and identity-based territorial mobilizations was not initially a planned part of French decentralization (Cole 2006); however, it had profound consequences at the sub-regional and sub-departmental levels. As a side effect, decentralization has made some room for experimentation with new objectives, new actors, and new policy instruments. These parallel processes have led to the current paradox, in which French central-state elites defend a Jacobin model while territorial elites elected after the 1982 decentralization engage in daily bargaining with language activists. Some questions remain unresolved, however. First, there is no guarantee that the process observed in the Euskera case could be replicated in another context. From that point of view, cross-border identities such as the Catalan or the Irish ones would probably be the most fitting cases to test the causal mechanism of compensation through exogenous variables identified in this chapter. Second, the future of the Basque territorial governance in France remains open. The 2010 territorial reform envisioned by President Sarkozy (resulting in the end of the pays, unification of regional and departmental State Tradition and Regional Languages in France | 183

elected officials, and metropolization) tended to demonstrate that the central state’s priority, in line with previous reforms (Cole 2006), consisted of reducing public spending by sharing costs among different actors. Nevertheless, this policy change also allowed room to deal with specific territorial situations such as the one in the Basque region. On 3 July 2012, the recently elected Socialist French Executive revised substantially the 2010 territorial reform and launched a series of meetings with territorial actors: the so-called Act iii of decentralization (Pasquier 2012). The French Basque Council of Elected Officials, relying on previous expertise, seized this new structural opportunity to ask for the creation of a new territorial authority for the Basque Country. Such an ad hoc statute – which still needs to be clarified – would include, inter alia, new capacities in linguistic policy matters and cross-border cooperation (Conseil des élus du Pays Basque 2012). Third, the financial and economic crisis that started in 2008 could also limit the current progress of language policy institutionalization. The autonomous governments of Euskadi and Navarre are among the richest regional authorities in Spain. Nevertheless, the post-2008 financial and economic crisis could limit their involvement in French-Basque language issues, and reorient their investments toward domestic concerns such as unemployment, health, housing, or transportation.⁹ Last, and for the first time ever, the institutionalization of the Euskera language policy recently met some resistance within the French Basque territory itself. In January 2012, parents from a public school located in the small town of Ustaritz signed a petition against the opening of a new bilingual section in French and Euskera. Those parents argued that Ustaritz offered sufficient existing resources for Euskera education, and that they preferred a unilingual school for their children (Sud-Ouest 2012a). The oplb ’s president replied that parents could not deny other parents bilingual education for their children. This situation opened a public debate about the language policy driven by the oplb . In a sense, the parents’ petition was also a paradoxical signal of the success of the language policy’s institutionalization. The initial consensus in favour of Euskera, which had itself replaced decades of marginalization, now seems to be leaving room for a new political debate.

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NOTES

1 This research was conducted in 2002, 2004 (including forty-one interviews), and 2005 (Baxok et al. 2006). The data were updated in 2008, 2009, and 2011 through fifteen interviews (research project “Vers une gouvernance transfrontalière en réseau,” Regional Council of Aquitaine). Itçaina also acknowledges the support of the European Commission under the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship. 2 In Spain, Euskera has been legally recognized as a co-official language in the autonomous communities of Euskadi and Navarre since 1982 and 1986, respectively. 3 The Seaska federation is the umbrella organization gathering the ikastolak immersion schools in the French Basque Country. 4 See Sonntag in this volume (chapter 2, 44–61). 5 The quantitative estimation of speakers in regional languages in France remains an arduous exercise given the lack of a unified source. Estimations of Occitan speakers, for instance, can vary from 500,000 to 3 million. For comparative attempts, see Harguindéguy and Cole (2009) and Clanché (2002). 6 In 2010, 57 per cent of primary schools proposed bilingual Basque/French education (42 per cent in 2005). In 2009–10, 67.70 per cent of the children frequented non-bilingual schools, whereas 32.30 per cent went to Basque-French bilingual ones (24.50 per cent in 2005). Among these 32.30 per cent, 55.80 per cent went to the public bilingual system, 23.02 per cent to the Catholic one, and 22.17 per cent to the immersive associative system of ikastola. Still, in 2010, the proportion of children choosing the bilingual system was relatively higher within the Catholic system (30.4 per cent of all children educated in Catholic schools) than in the public one (25.9 per cent) (oplb 2010). 7 According to Amado Borthayre (2006), some of these cross-border social movements aim to lobby the representative institutions to reinforce the current language policy (like Euskal Herrian Euskaraz) while other ones propose an alternative policy model based on their own networks (like the ikastola, aek , or the Basque summer school Udako Euskal Unibertsitatea). 8 The ikastola had to deal with internal discrepancies concerning the integration of their different territorial federations (notably from Navarre) in regard to the European cooperative (Azurmendi 2009). 9 The socialist-led government of Euskadi (2009–12), when facing budgetary constraints, decided in 2010 to maintain its grant to the ikastolak in the French Basque Country. The grant (400,000 until 2012) was low compared to the more than 1 million the former government had supplied (eitb.com 2010).

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– 2005. “Nationalism in the French Basque Country.” Regional and Federal Studies 15 (1): 75–91. Amado Borthayre, Lontzi. 2006. “Los movimientos sociales ‘nacionales’ de la lengua ¿Creadores de políticas públicas ‘nacionales’ vascas?” In Acción colectiva Hegoalde-Iparralde, edited by Francisco Letamendia, 285–99. Madrid: Fundamentos. Azurmendi, Nerea. 2009. “Discrepancias en el proceso de integración de las ikastolas en una cooperativa europea.” Diario Vasco, 3 July. http://www.diariovasco.com/20090703/al-dia-local/discrepancias-procesointegracion-ikastolas-20090703.html. Barral, Pierre. 1974. “Idéal et pratique du régionalisme dans le régime de Vichy.” Revue française de science politique 24 (5): 911–39. Baxok, Erramun. 2008. “Hizkuntza antolaketaren bideetan.” Bat, Soziolinguistika Aldizkaria 67 (2): 67–77. Baxok, Erramun, and Jean-Baptiste Coyos. 2010. “Gazteak, euskera eta aisialdiak Ipar Euskal Herrian.” Euskera 55 (2): 627–47. Baxok, Erramun, Pantxoa Etxegoin, Terexa Lekunberri, Iñaki Martínez de Luna, Larraitz Mendizabal, Igor Ahego, Xabier Itçaina, and Roldán Jimeno. 2006. Identidad y cultura vascas a comienzos del siglo xxi . San Sebastián: Sociedad de Estudios Vascos. Berria. 2009. “Legeari beha, hizkuntzaren geroa hizpide.” 29 December. Betbeder, Titto. 2006. “Euskararen Erakunde Publikoa. Hizkuntza politika bat egituratzen Ipar Euskal Herrian.” Bat, Soziolinguistika Aldizkaria 59 (1): 41–58. Blanchet, Philippe, Roland Breton, and Harold Schiffman, eds. 1999. Les langues régionales de France: Un état des lieux à la veille du xxi e siècle. Louvain: Peeters. Borthayrou, Jakes, Peyo Etcheverry-Ainchart, and Maialen Garat. 2005. Le mouvement culturel basque: 1951–2001, tome 2. Bayonne: Elkar. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1982. Ce que parler veut dire: L’économie des échanges linguistiques. Paris: Fayard. Cerquiglini, Bernard. 2003. Les langues de France. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Chaussier Jean-Daniel. 1996. Quel territoire pour le Pays Basque? Les cartes d’identité. Paris: L’Harmattan. Clairis, Christophe, Denis Costaouec, and Jean-Baptiste Coyos, eds. 1999. Langues et cultures régionales de France: État des lieux, enseignement, politiques. Paris: L’Harmattan. Clanché, François. 2002. Langues régionales, langues étrangères: De l’héritage à la pratique. Paris: Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques. Cole, Alistair. 2006. “Decentralization in France: Central Steering, Capacity Building and Identity Construction.” French Politics 4 (1): 31–57. Cole, Alistair, and John Loughlin. 2003. “Beyond the Unitary State? Public Opinion, Political Institutions and Public Policy in Brittany.” Regional Studies 37 (3): 265–76.

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Conseil des élus du Pays Basque. 2012. Contribution du Pays Basque aux États généraux de la démocratie territoriale: Point d’étape au 6 septembre 2012. Bayonne: Communiqué du Conseil des élus du Pays basque. Council of Europe. 1992. European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Coyos, Jean-Baptiste. 2004. Politique linguistique: Langue basque et langue occitane du Béarn et de Gascogne. Bayonne: Elkar. – 2008. “Hizkuntz politika Ipar Euskal Herrian: nondik nora? Ibilbidearen azterketa.” Bat, Soziolinguistika Aldizkaria 36 (2): 79–102. eitb.com. 2010. “El gobierno vasco concederá 400,000 euros a las ikastolas de Iparralde,” 21 September. Elias, Norbert. 1982. The Civilizing Process: Power and Civilty. New York: Pantheon Books. Garat, Maialen, and Xan Aire. 2009. Seaska, 40 urte euskararen alde. Donostia: Elkar. Harguindéguy, Jean-Baptiste, and Alistair Cole. 2009. “La politique linguistique de la France à l’épreuve des revendications ethnoterritoriales.” Revue française de science politique 59 (5): 939–66. Harguindéguy, Jean-Baptiste, and Xabier Itçaina. 2012. “Towards an Institutionalized Language Policy for the French Basque Country? Actors, Processes and Outcomes.” European Urban and Regional Studies 19 (4): 434–47. Itçaina, Xabier. 2010. “Appartenances linguistiques et identités collectives en Pays Basque: retour sur une enquête.” Cultures et conflits 79–80: 19–36. Itçaina, Xabier, Jacques Palard, and Bernard Vignes. 1997. “Politique institutionnelle ou mobilisation sociale? Le Fonds commun Aquitaine-Euskadi.” In L’Europe aux frontières, edited by Jacques Palard, 131–54. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Jacob, James. 1994. Hills of Conflict: Basque Nationalism in France. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Journal Officiel du Sénat. 2010. “Ratification de la Charte européenne des langues minoritaires ou régionales.” Journal officiel du sénat, 18 November. – 2011. “Ratification de la Charte européenne des langues minoritaires ou régionales.” Journal officiel du sénat, 19 January. Judge, Ann. 2000. “France: One State, One Nation, One Language.” In Language and Nationalism in Europe, edited by Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael, 42–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laborde, Denis. 1999. “Politique culturelle et langue basque.” In The Regional Languages of France: An Inventory on the Eve of the 21st Century, edited by Pierre Blanchet, Roland Breton, and Harold Schiffman, 141–60. Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters. Letamendia, Francisco. 1997. “Basque Nationalism and Cross-Border Co-operation between the Southern and Northern Basque Countries.” Regional and Federal Studies 17 (2): 25–41.

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Linz, Juan, Francisco Andrés Orizo, and Dario Vila Madrid. 1986. Conflicto en Euskadi. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Loughlin, John. 1985. “A New Deal for France’s Regions and Linguistic Minorities.” West European Politics 8 (3): 101–13. Mansvelt Beck, Jan. 2005. Territory and Terror: Conflicting Nationalisms in the Basque Country. London: Routledge. Mezo, Josu. 2008. El palo y la zanahoria: Política lingüística y educación en Irlanda y el País Vasco. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales. Office public de la langue basque (oplb ). 2010. Évolution de l’enseignement en langue basque dans les écoles du Pays Basque. Bayonne: Office public de la langue basque. Oronos, Michel. 2002. Le mouvement culturel basque, 1951–2001, tome 1. Bayonne: Elkar. Oronos, Michel, Lucien Etxezarreta, and Xipri Arbelbide. 2008. Le mouvement culturel basque 1951–2001, tome 3. Bayonne: Elkar. Pasquier, Romain. 2012. Le pouvoir régional: Mobilisations, décentralisation et gouvernance en France. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Poignant, Bernard. 1998. Rapport sur les langues et cultures régionales. Paris: Ministère de la Culture. Rochas, Amandine. 2009. “La lutte contre l’exclusion des langues minoritaires: Pratiques et savoirs d’une politique publique – France, Italie, Suisse (1992–2008).” phd diss., Institut d’études politiques de Grenoble. Sud-Ouest. 2012a. “Pays Basque: des parents lancent une pétition contre le bilinguisme dans une école.” 25 January. – 2012b. “Max Brisson en colère. L’ancien président de l’oplb répond aux critiques de Thierry Delobel, président d’Ikas-bi.” 31 January. Tejerina, Benjamin. 1999. “El poder de los símbolos: Identidad colectiva y movimiento etnolingüística en el País Vasco.” Revista Española de Investigación Sociológica 88: 75–105. Touraine, Alain, François Dubet, Zsusa Hegedus, and Michel Wievorka. 1981. Le pays contre l’État, luttes occitanes. Paris: Seuil. Urteaga, Eguzki. 2004. La politique linguistique au Pays basque. Paris: L’Harmattan. Viceconsejería de Política Lingüística – Euskeraren Erakunde Publikoa. 2012. V Encuesta Sociolingüistica 2011. Vitoria: Gobierno Vasco. Villafañez Perez, Itziar. 2010. “The Implementation of the Statute of European Cooperative Society in the Basque Country: Euskal Herriko Ikastolak sce .” Conference paper for Les contributions des coopératives à une économie plurielle. Université Lumières Lyon 2: Chambre régionale de l’économie sociale et solidaire, Rhônes-Alpes. Weber, Eugen. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France. London: Chatto and Windus. Wright, Susan. 2000. “Jacobins, Regionalists and the Council of Europe’s Charter for Regional and Minority Languages.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 21 (5): 414–25.

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PART THREE | COMP O NE NT S

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10 Canada’s Official Languages Policy and the Federal Public Service H E L A I N A GAS PAR D

The adoption of the Official Languages Act (ola ) 1969 was a critical juncture for Canada’s language regime. For the first time in the country’s then over one-hundred-year history, law declared that English and French had equal status in federal institutions. Broadly, the ola aimed to ensure that the government could provide services in both official languages across the country and to enable public servants to work in either official language within the federal public service. The public service and its composition are important for a country characterized by linguistic dualism. Not only is it a major employer (employing 262,817 people in 2013 [Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat 2014]), it also has important symbolic implications. As Beattie, Désy, and Longstaff (1972) explain, the bureaucracy serves two principal integrative functions. First, based on size and scope, and when Crown corporations and the Canadian Forces are included, it is the largest unit in the Canadian economy. Second, as a political institution, it ranks behind only the House of Commons and the Cabinet in symbolic importance (Beattie, Désy, and Longstaff 1972, xiii). The bureaucracy is more than just another economic unit, because “its activity has meaning for both Francophone and Anglophone Canadians far beyond mere considerations of what decisions are made or what product is produced. How the Public Service does things – who it employs, where it operates, and what language is used – is as important as what it does” (Beattie, Désy, and Longstaff 1972, xiii). As Sutherland and Doern (1985, 144) explain, when it came to rectifying the inequality facing women, language minorities, and visible minorities¹ in the 1970s, reform had to start somewhere in Canada, and “in each case, the answer to the ‘somewhere’ was the public service … In a sense, the bureaucracy assumed

a burden for the whole of society, policies on employment in public service jobs substituting for basic social, economic and education policy.” The ola made the federal public service a central target of language reforms. In order to reflect the society it served and to effectively serve members of the public in their official language of choice, the public service had to shift from being a largely English-speaking and anglophone-dominated institution to one that better reflected the dual-language realities of Canadian society. The public service, however, was not a blank slate, and any reforms the state introduced would be subject to the existing set of institutional and administrative traditions that informed its operation. What explains the ola 1969’s limited implementation in the Canadian federal public service? In this chapter, I argue that the merit principle constrained that implementation by emphasizing individual competency over the advancement of group-centred language rights. The act promised important change through the representation of both official language groups and the ability to work in both official languages. Due to the influence of the merit principle, however, these changes did not materialize equally. The ola was successful in fostering the more equitable representation of French and English speakers in the federal public service (based on demographic weight). However, the English language continues to dominate as the main language of work in the federal public service. In this chapter, I examine the tensions between the merit principle and the instruments that the federal government used to implement the ola in the federal public service. The ola can be analyzed through an assessment of two of these instruments introduced in the 1970s: the Frenchlanguage units (flu ) and the linguistic designation of positions. The flu s were meant to encourage employees to work in French; the linguistic designation of positions was meant to meet service and work needs within the federal public service. Conceptually, these recommendations can be divided into two categories. First, the flu s address group-based language advances. Second, the linguistic designation of positions emphasizes individual responsibility when it comes to language. The distinction in approaches is important because only the latter component endures today. In the introduction to this volume, Sonntag and Cardinal (page 5) define state tradition “as a conceptual framework for understanding language policy choices.” In so doing, they consider the interactions between the historical, institutional, and normative dynamics that inform state choices in language policy. In order to account for these dynamics, I engage in process

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tracing: I analyze the institutional and administrative parameters through which the state governs language matters in the federal public service. I proceed in three parts. First, I briefly explain how the merit principle was adopted in the public service. Second, I review the context of language policy adoption. Third, I show how the two instruments’ differing fates reflect the influence of the merit principle and contribute to the broader persistence of English as the dominant language of work in the federal public service. I conclude with a discussion of the relevance of the two case studies for furthering our understanding of the use of official languages in Canada’s federal public service. T HE ME R I T P R I N CI P LE I N CA N A D A’ S F ED ERAL PUBLIC SE RV ICE

The merit principle was adopted as part of the 1918 Civil Service Act. Merit was to be used as a means to develop a professional and expert public service, free from the patronage linkages of the past. In this way, the person with the right abilities, rather than the one with the right political connections, would get the job. Earlier appointments to the public service were largely by patronage and politicians or higher-ranking civil servants could hand pick appointees. Patronage appointments did in fact help to guarantee a certain measure of linguistic balance in the early public service. For instance, francophone politicians could encourage the employment of other French speakers in the public service by having them hired. However, this equilibrium eventually eroded with the adoption of the merit principle. Under the merit principle, employment and promotion were based on public servants’ individual competencies and measured through established regulations and exams. Merit and efficiency became the dominant forces of organizational rationale after this period (Beattie, Désy, and Longstaff 1972, 5). Conceptions of efficiency and merit introduced shortly before and after 1918 strengthened the public service’s use of English while reducing its use of French. Entrance exams and hiring processes were premised on anglophone learning styles and subjects, which were different than those part of the francophone emphasis on classical training. With inadequate success on the entrance exam, the number of French-speaking appointments was limited, particularly with the end of patronage practices. Taken together, these practices and regulations contributed to the dominance of English as a language of work. It was assumed that the new

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processes, such as testing, were neutral and therefore that merit would ensure the representation of both groups (Beattie, Désy, and Longstaff 1972, 5). Instead, these changes likely contributed to an erosion of francophone representation in the public service in Ottawa. In 1918, francophones made up 22 per cent of the service; by 1946, they made up 13 per cent (Canada 1969a, 260). With the Civil Service Act of 1918, the public service grew toward a “more rationalized ideal of the bureaucracy where the technical competence of personnel was to be the prime consideration for obtaining the goal of efficiency” (Heward 1966, 8). Rationality and efficiency were associated with unilingualism. The advent of merit and efficiency as rationalized operating principles reinforced the institution’s tendencies to operate in English. With the declining presence of francophone public servants and the focus on operational efficiency, there was less space for language concerns. It is interesting to note that the 1918 act, which was a significant piece of reform legislation for the public service, “did not seek to alter, materially, existing practices pertaining to language requirements in recruitment and government business, or to codify them in any explicit way” (Steiner n.d., 6; see also Canada 1969a, 257). It was a common belief within the bureaucratic establishment that the use of both French and English would weaken efficiency (Innis 1973, 94). As efficiency was a fundamental principle of organization, any factors that might reduce it were deemed expendable even at the cost of alienating a large portion of the population. Above all the institutionally engrained limitations, the connection between efficiency and unilingualism would prove to be significant. Conceptions of the country’s duality and of the need for public servants to serve the public in both official languages, as well as to have top public servants function in both languages, were not considered relevant until well after 1918. Until the improvements in the 1960s, “the tendency [was] for the representatives of English-speaking Canada to drive out, smother, or assimilate those from French Canada” in the federal public service (Beattie, Désy, and Longstaff 1972, 14). T HE A DOPT I ON O F T H E O F F I CI A L L A N G U A G E S POLICY

Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson’s April 1966 statement on official languages in the House of Commons was the first of its kind. Broadly, Pearson declared his government’s commitment to making the public service bi-

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lingual by ensuring francophones could work and be served in French, all in the name of national unity. Importantly, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (b&b Commission) (1963–69) was launched before the proclamation in response to the Québécois’ mounting nationalism and the growing unrest in Quebec (see for instance Canada 1965). The b&b Commission had a mandate to study the state of French-English relations and the status of these languages in Canada. In its report, it stated that the country was facing the worst crisis in its history and had to take decisive action to remedy the situation. Recommendations from the commission were released in six books that addressed the official languages, the education system, the world of work (including the public service and the military), the cultural contributions of other ethnic groups, the National Capital Region, and voluntary associations. The b&b Commission’s launch was an important first step in the establishment of a Canadian linguistic regime and pan-Canadian identity. On 17 October 1968, in response to the recommendations of the first book of the b&b Commission, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Pearson’s successor, stated that the government accepted the report’s recommendations and moved that the House of Commons sit as a Committee of the Whole to study a bill on official languages. Parliamentary debates on the ola were passionate and at times contentious. The bill’s legality and constitutionality were questioned; references to Belgium being torn apart by language disputes and the similar fate that awaited Canada were raised during the debates (Canada 1969b, 10,902). Despite the opposition, particularly from Western Canada on bilingualism and official languages in general, the bill passed in 1969. One of the ola ’s principal intentions and components was to encourage national unity through the provision of federal services to the public in both official languages across the country, by making documents available in both official languages, and by making legislative texts in both official languages equally valid. The ola contained no legal provisions to allow individual public servants to work in their official language of choice.² Even without granting such a right, it envisioned that English and French would both be the languages of work in the federal public service. Trudeau’s action in the area of official languages was part of a premeditated vision for Canada (Trudeau 1993, 123). With national unity under threat, he focused on expedient implementation of the official languages legislation and immediate tangible results for citizens.

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In order to implement the newly adopted ola , the government looked to the instruments the b&b Commission suggested. In Book iii , it made twenty-four recommendations concerning the federal public service, including the establishment of flu s, improved language training and translation, appropriate public service staffing, and the creation of the necessary administrative structure to foster an equal partnership between both official languages in federal institutions. Despite the b&b Commission’s recommendations for structural changes to realize bilingualism in the public service through language planning instruments such as flu s, the government “paid less attention to structural reforms,” and this neglect, according to the 1973 Task Force on Bilingualism (1973, 267), resulted in “extremely important” consequences. The commission’s advice was to focus on institutional and structural changes. Instead, in an attempt to expedite reform Trudeau adopted and implemented recommendations that focused on individual employees. From the task force’s perspective, the desire for quick reform was detrimental over the long term because if employees did not have the ability to use their choice of language within the public service’s institutional structures and in their everyday practices, their individual bilingualism would have little meaning (Canada 1969a, 765). flu s, for instance, would have been useful tools for altering the structure of the public service by making it more amenable to the use of both official languages as regular languages of work. IN S T R UME N TS TO I MP LEMEN T O F F I CI A L L A NGUAGE S POLICY IN THE FE DE R A L P UB LIC SER VI CE French-Language Units

flu s were a fundamental recommendation of b&b Commission, meant to equalize francophone and anglophone participation in the public service by developing units in every department and agency that would operate in French (Canada 1969a, 766). A cabinet decision on 29 July 1971 authorized experimental flu s in various federal departments and agencies based on the b&b ’s recommendation. The Treasury Board Secretariat led the program’s implementation within the federal public service and announced through its president, C.M. Drury, that 457 flu s involving approximately 29,000 employees would be established. The majority, 330 of the 457 (with 85.5 per cent of all flu personnel), would be in Quebec, one hundred

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would be in the National Capital Region, and the rest would be outside of these areas, including eight units abroad. These units were meant to improve service to the public, recruit unilingual or bilingual francophones with greater ease, encourage the development of French as an equal language of work, and help anglophones improve their French (Library and Archives Canada [lac ] 1971). After a year, departments and agencies involved in the pilot project would report back and make suggestions, which would permit the government to “assess how far French-language units encourage bilingualism in the public service and complement the Government’s policy of providing service to the public in the two official languages” (lac 1971). The staff unions were not keen on the concept of flu s. Treasury Board Secretariat officials described the resistance of the Public Service Association of Canada and the Professional Institute of the Public Service as distressing (lac 1970a). The staff associations were not convinced of the flu s’ merits and wanted assurances that no one would be laid off for not being able to serve in one. Even during the experimental phase, every effort was taken to reassure unilingual (usually anglophone) employees. Anyone assigned to a newly declared flu who did not have the required knowledge of French would be relocated without fear of losing their job (lac 1970a). An employee survey indicated that most francophones, especially those in the lower levels of the public service, were not fully in favour of flu s. However, the majority of those in higher levels (e.g., officers and executives) were in favour. Slightly more than 50 per cent of anglophones across both lower and upper levels did not endorse the units (lac 1970b). Thus, the majority of employees, in addition to the unions representing them, were not pleased about the flu s. Francophones feared ghettoization or relegation to these units without the ability to move up in the public service (Gallant 2012; Yalden 2012). Although flu s were doing well in Quebec (as many units had operated in French before their designation as flu s), the situation in the National Capital Region was different. There, the experiment did not have the force it warranted “because departments were not prepared to make the necessary structural changes, even on an experimental basis” (Task Force on Bilingualism 1973, 242). Linguistically defined units (unilingual and bilingual) have existed over the years in the Canadian Forces (Daveluy 2006). For instance, hmcs Montcalm, founded in 1923, was the first French-speaking unit in the

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Canadian Navy (Royal Canadian Navy 2012). The Royal 22nd Regiment, also known as the Van Doos, is a French-speaking military unit with a onehundred-year history of service. Despite the longevity of French-speaking units in the military, flu s in the public service were replaced with “units working in French,” which were meant to be similar to but less rigid than the originally conceived unit, and allowed francophones coming to Ottawa to feel comfortable working in their official language of choice and with little knowledge of English. Many people were unhappy with the original flu s – and the flus essentially phased themselves out (Yalden 2012). No written record of or references to flu s can be found after 1974. In its original form, the flu was a group-oriented instrument that sought the representation and advancement of the francophone community in the public service. This instrument was problematic among francophones because they feared a lack of opportunity for advancement. It was also problematic among staff unions, dominated by anglophone members, who viewed it as a potential threat to their membership. With such opposition, flu s did not survive. Beyond their administrative complications, flu s were not in keeping with the merit principle, the public service’s foremost hiring criteria. The majority of public servants could not equitably access them (unless unilingual anglophones learned French), and so they were considered exclusionary and contradicted the premise of the merit principle, whereby a qualified individual who met the criteria of a position could succeed in attaining higher-ranking positions in the public service. Language competencies were viewed as part of the merit criteria required to fill a position, but only on an individual basis. In an institution with a path-dependent tradition of operating based on individuals’ expertise and competencies, how could flu s promote the inclusion or working environment of one group over another? Focusing on the advancement of a specific linguistic group challenged the merit principle. The majority – in this case, union-represented anglophone public servants – would not accept threats to the established institutional structure. Even francophone public servants did not endorse flu s because they felt the units hampered their opportunities for success. The failure of the flu instrument reflects the tensions between the principles of the ola and merit as a central administrative principle that could not be reconceptualized to include the promotion of French speakers. flu s challenged the public service’s persistent characteristics by seeking to upset its tendency

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to operate predominantly in English and organize itself based on the presumably accessible criteria of merit. Language competencies would eventually be viewed as part of the merit criteria required to fill a position, but only on an individual basis. This meant that institutional structures like flu s could not survive because they challenged the premise of fairness and equal access in the public service. Positions’ Linguistic Designation

The linguistic designation of positions as unilingual English, unilingual French, bilingual, or ambivalent (meaning either language was acceptable) was introduced to increase the use of both official languages in the public service. The b&b Commission recommended that all positions in federal departments and agencies be classified based on language requirements. Further, it recommended that any employees – not just stenographers and secretaries – who use both official languages be compensated accordingly through the bilingualism bonus (Canada 1969, 807). This recommendation refers to the 50 annual bonus, first introduced after revisions to the Civil Service Act in 1888, paid to public servants able to compose in both English and French. This bonus continues to exist today with an annual value of 800 paid out to public servants in a bilingual position whose Second Language Evaluation results confirm they meet their position’s language requirements. In March 1970, the Public Service Commission started a language identification program to determine the proficiency levels required for positions where both official languages were needed. A test to assess the language capabilities of employees claiming to know both official languages was developed. However, according to the Task Force on Bilingualism, designating bilingual positions as a means to implement official languages policies and programs was not efficient or effective. The designation process was not well thought out, since communications between employees in unilingual positions with those in bilingual ones were not considered. The result was that some employees in designated bilingual positions were unable to use their bilingualism skills (Task Force on Bilingualism 1973, 262). Some departments were hesitant to designate positions as bilingual because they felt it would create inflexibility in language capabilities for work units and lead to a (short-term) decrease in operational efficiency (Task Force on

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Bilingualism 1973, 263). Finally, with no clear division of responsibility between the various departments and the Public Service Commission, there were no concerted efforts to develop a clear and definitive framework to identify positions’ language requirements. In 1973, the Parliamentary Resolution on Official Languages in the Public Service was introduced to clarify the implementation of the ola . The resolution, which passed unanimously in the House of Commons, reaffirmed the government’s commitment to the principles of the ola 1969 and confirmed public servants’ right to work in the official language of their choice, with certain constraints. Several changes to positions’ linguistic designation had to be made to give effect to the language of work policy encapsulated in the resolution. Most supervisory positions had to be designated as bilingual in areas where both official languages were in use in government offices, e.g., in the National Capital Region, Montreal, certain parts of Quebec, parts of northern and eastern Ontario, and parts of northern and eastern New Brunswick. However, concerns about the changes, which came mainly from staff associations, were assuaged with many “generous accommodations” (Hudson 2009, 2) for unilingual anglophone employees. For example, unilingual incumbents in bilingual positions could receive language training at public expense, and retained the option to be transferred if they did not want it. Unilingual employees aged fifty-five and older could also be appointed to a bilingual position without meeting the language requirements, as could employees with ten or more years of service beginning on or before 6 April 1966 and continuously employed by the public service since (Hudon 2009, 2). In 1977, responsibility for the official languages program underwent significant decentralization. Managers became involved in the linguistic designation of positions based on Public Service Commission standards. These designations involved reading, writing, and oral communication. Imperative staffing was to apply to certain positions to be determined by deputy ministers and the Public Service Commission, meaning that anyone entering such a position had to meet its language qualifications upon appointment. However, employees aged fifty-five and older could remain in their positions as unilinguals at the time, except where a bilingual imperative had been defined (Treasury Board of Canada 1977). Though the designation process was imperfect, it was the only instrument to survive. By complying with the individualism inherent in the merit principle, unlike the group-oriented flu s, the linguistic designa-

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tion of positions was acceptable to the majority of public servants for two reasons. First, those who no longer met their positions’ linguistic requirements had ample opportunities to transfer into similar jobs. Second, those who wanted to remain in their positions had the tools available to achieve the required level of bilingualism. It was thus the individual public servant’s responsibility to meet a post’s criteria in order to obtain or maintain it. The emphasis on individual competency paired well with the merit principle. Attaching a position’s language requirement to an individual did not favour one linguistic group over another (even though francophones tended to be more bilingual than their anglophone counterparts) because every public servant who did not meet their position’s linguistic requirements had recourse for language training at public expense. Giving individuals the responsibility to meet the competencies of their positions, and offering the tools (through language training) to do so, was acceptable to the public service. Combined with the accommodations for long-serving employees, the linguistic designation of positions was acceptable for the majority by not holding them accountable for meeting language requirements (unless they were in a managerial post) or by appearing to favour one group over another. This instrument contributed to the broader goal of increasing francophone representation within the public service while also upholding individualism through the merit principle and providing acceptable tools to accommodate the majority through language training and transfers. C ON C LUS I ON

The process tracing of the ola 1969’s implementation in the federal public service points to the importance of administrative and institutional principles in influencing the implementation of legislation. As demonstrated above, most public servants preferred policy instruments that aligned with individual-oriented principles, specifically the existing merit principle. They were willing to accept and tolerate only those policy instruments that reflected that principle. This seeming capacity of the majority of public servants to define what is acceptable and reasonable is an important component of the language policy debate in Canada and the advancement of Canada’s language regime. Gradually, however, conceptions of merit changed and came to include the language requirements of public service positions. As early as 1965,

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the Civil Service Commission (the predecessor of the present day Public Service Commission that manages staffing and the upholding of the merit principle in the public service) alluded to language as a criteria of merit (Canada 1969a, 311–12). Until the ola 1969, such allusions were neither regular nor systematic. After its adoption, official languages became a regular consideration in staffing competencies and decision-making. The merit principle today manifests as an administrative principle that guides the employment process “not only by protecting against political patronage, but also by ensuring that employees are hired and can advance based on their ability to do the work rather than on personal favouritism” (Public Service Commission of Canada 2005). The 2003 Public Service Employment Act (s. 30) requires that employees meet their positions’ official language(s) proficiency requirements to fulfill the criteria of merit. Although the merit principle today includes knowledge of both official languages, it played an important role by constraining the ola ’s initial implementation efforts in the 1970s. Section 40(4b) of the ola reaffirmed merit as the main selection criteria for employment and stated that nothing would detract from it. In essence, conceptions of merit on paper evolved to include official languages. The merit principle is so engrained in the public service that any instrument that did not align with it or that challenged its individual-oriented approach could not survive.

NOTES

1 The Employment Equity Act (where Statistics Canada draws its definitions) defines a visible minority as: “persons, other than aboriginal peoples, who are nonCaucasion in race or non-white in colour” (Canada 1995, section 3). 2 The 1973 Parliamentary Resolution provided provisions for language of work, and the revised ola (1988) included sections that provided the right to language of work with certain restrictions.

REFERENCES

Beattie, Christopher, Jacques Désy, and Stephen Longstaff. 1972. Bureaucratic Careers: Anglophones and Francophones in the Canadian Public Service. Ottawa: Information Canada, Documents of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.

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Bourgeois, Daniel. 2006. The Canadian Bilingual Districts. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press. Canada. 1969. House of Commons Debates, 18 June 1969–22 October 1969, 1st session, 28th Parliament, Vol. 10. – 2012. Royal Canadian Navy, “Unit’s Portal.” Accessed 12 June 2012. http://www.navy.forces.gc.ca/navres/nearestUnit_uniteLaPlusPres/hmcs_ ncsm_MONTCALM/mtm-unitPortal_portailUnite-eng.asp. – Veterans Affairs. 2012. “Le ministre Blaney rend hommage aux soldats canadiens disparus et participe à l’avant-première du film Le 22e Régiment en Afghanistan.” 8 November 2011. http://www.veterans.gc.ca/fra/ministere/presse/ communique/1273. – 1965. Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism: Preliminary Report. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer. – 1969a. Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. Book 3. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer. – 1969b. Official Languages Act. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer. – Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages. 1971–72. 1971–1972 Annual Report. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer. – Treasury Board. 1977. Revisions to the Official Languages Policies in the Public Service. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer. – 1995. Employment Equity Act. Accessed 17 June 2014. http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/E-5.401/page-1.html?texthighlight= minorities+minoritC3A9s+visibles+visibles-3. Coulombe, Pierre. 2001. “Federalist Language Policies: The Cases of Canada and Spain.” In Multinational Democracies, edited by Alain-G. Gagnon and James Tully, 242–56. New York: Cambridge University Press. Daveluy, Michelle. 2006. “Communicating among Linguistic Communities Onboard a Canadian Navy Ship.” Paper presented at the alpa Conference, SaintMary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. http://www.ualberta.ca/~mdaveluy/. Gagnon, Alain-G., and Raffaele Iacovino. 2007. Federalism, Citizenship and Québec: Debating Multinationalism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gallant, Edgar. 2012. Interview with the author. 7 March. Ottawa. Heward, Judith. 1966. History of Bilingualism and Biculturalism in the Canadian Public Service. Ottawa: Information Canada, Internal Research Project of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism no. 34. Hudon, Marie-Ève. 2009. Official Languages in the Public Service: From 1973 to the Present. Ottawa: Library of Parliament. Innis, Harold. 1973. Bilingualism and Biculturalism. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited in Cooperation with the Secretary of State Department and Information Canada. – 1999. The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Lecours, André. 2005. “New Institutionalism: Issues and Questions.” In New Institutionalism: Theory and Analysis, edited by André Lecours, 3–26. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Library and Archives Canada. 1970a. rg 55, vol. 1,387, file 4,560-13, pt. 1. – 1970b. rg 32, vol. 1,007, file chm -125-4-1, pt. 1. – 1971. rg 55, vol. 1,165-15, pt. 1. – 1972. rg 32, vol. 6,396, Cab Doc 60–72. McRae, Kenneth D. 1998. “Official Bilingualism: From the 1960s to the 1990s.” In Language in Canada, edited by John Edwards, 61–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Magnet, Joseph Eliot. 1998. “Language Rights Theory in Canadian Perspective.” In Language and Politics in the United States and Canada: Myths and Realities, edited by Thomas Ricento and Barabra Burnaby, 185–205. Mahwah, nj : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Public Service Commission of Canada. 2005. “Assessing Merit.” Accessed 13 January 2013. http://www.psc-cfp.gc.ca/plcy-pltq/guides/merit-merite/ index-eng.htm. Rocher, François. 2006. “La dynamique Québec-Canada ou le refus de l’idéal fédéral?” In Le fédéralisme canadien contemporain, edited by Alain-G. Gagnon, 93–146. Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal. Simeon, Richard. 2002. Political Science and Federalism: Seven Decades of Scholarly Engagement. Kingston: Institute of Intergovernmental Relations. Smith, Miriam. 2008. Political Institutions and Lesbian and Gay Rights in the United States and Canada. New York: Routledge. Task Force on Bilingualism. 1973. Module 22: Balanced Participation (Integrated Report). Ottawa: Treasury Board, Personnel Policy Branch, Manpower Division, Bilingualism Division. Trudeau, Pierre E. 1993. Memoirs. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Inc. Yalden, Maxwell. 2012. Interview with the author. 3 May. Ottawa.

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11 India’s Language Regime: The Eighth Schedule¹ ASHA SARANGI

India is one of the most linguistically rich, dense, and complex societies in the world, and this linguistic diversity poses numerous challenges and dilemmas for its planners and policy-makers. In post-independence India, a number of initiatives, policies, and programs have been taken up to accommodate a large number of languages in administration, education, and several other public and private realms. In this chapter, I analyze the interface between “state tradition” and “language regime” in India through a case study of the Eighth Schedule (es ) of the Indian Constitution. The es is a unique attempt to strike a balance between, on the one hand, state traditions based on plural, democratic, federal, and liberal principles, and, on the other hand, a language regime based on notions of collective rights of language users and language communities. Anti-colonial nationalism and several language-based regional identity movements since the late nineteenth century provide the historical context in favour of inserting the es in the Indian Constitution at the time India became a republic. The result was a compromise formula of retaining socially embedded linguistic pluralism as a form of cultural diversity and constitutionally mandated institutionalized language planning to bring about some sort of political unity. The es allows both state institutions and language communities to stake their claims in terms of recognition and legitimation of some languages more than others in contemporary India’s social, religious, economic, political, and cultural spheres. The es is a significant component of India’s language regime.² Its retention and expansion over the last six decades can be interpreted as the expression of the democratic rights of diverse language communities, in that it privileges language rights as cultural-political rights in India’s

democratic political system. The expansion of the es since independence indicates the Indian state’s accommodative language policy in regard to complex issues of societal multilingualism, including multilingual education, administration, and culture (Khubchandani 1995, 32). In its simplest rendition, the es is a list of Indian languages that are constitutionally recognized for official use. There are twenty-two languages listed in the es and about thirty-eight other languages aspiring for this recognition in present-day India, suggesting that the state might have to govern in sixty official languages in the years to come. It is pertinent to discuss here briefly the linguistic diversity of the country at large to understand the rationale behind the creation of es in the Indian constitution. In contemporary India, there are a total number of twenty-two official state languages in the es . These languages have been called by different names such as the national, official, major, scheduled, or modern Indian languages. The country has more than 700 languages, 1,800 mother tongues, and numerous dialects and minor languages (Sarangi 2009a, 14–17). All India Radio broadcasts programs and news bulletins in twenty-four languages and 146 dialects at the national and regional levels. There are about sixty-seven languages used for primary school education. There are multiscript languages such as Bodo, Konkani, and Santhali used in different states and across state borders (see Sarangi 2009b). Below, I highlight the es ’s critical junctures and moments of enunciation and implementation. India’s language regime emerged from these crucial historical stages and state actions of various kinds. The dominant ideological conceptions and cultural-linguistic practices associated with the use and users of languages have been significant contributing factors in determining the insertion of languages in the es . The es , as I demonstrate below, exemplifies how India’s state traditions guide and inform a language regime that seeks to accommodate the country’s immense linguistic diversity. I draw my analysis from a critical political and historical contextualization of the es , based on a close reading of numerous political petitions made by various language groups and communities on the floors of national parliament and state legislatures over the last several decades. In doing so, I contend that there are diverse voices of dissent and consent that need to be retrieved in order to understand the social, cultural, ideological, and political embedding of the es in India’s institutionalized state apparatus. It is important to see how the entire process of including a particular language in the es starts. To begin with, a member of parliament, member 206 | Asha Sarangi

of the legislative assembly, or an organization, community, or individual has to raise the demand. The demand is placed in the Ministry of Home Affairs, which refers it to the cabinet and then to the parliament, where its potential inclusion in the es is debated and discussed. After much discussion, debate, and at times serious arguments over the status of languages fit for inclusion in the es and whether the language in question has such status, it is finally sent to the president for consent. Moreover, different ministries and departments are asked to comment on the cabinet note that is prepared for finalizing the decision on whether to include a particular language in the es .³ My analysis of the es in this chapter has four parts: the Constituent Assembly’s debates in developing the constitutional mandate of the es ; the role of es languages in governance and administration; the expansion of the es with the increasing demand for more languages to be included in it; and finally short comings of the es vis-à-vis minority languages outside its ambit. T HE C ON S T I T UT I O N A L MA N D AT E O F T H E EIGHTH SCHE DULE

The Indian Constitution was passed by the Constituent Assembly on 26 November 1949 and came into effect on 26 January 1950. It is one of the longest written constitutions in the world, with twenty-two parts, 395 articles, and twelve schedules, as well as more than hundred amendments to date. Each part consists of articles that state various provisions of the Constitution. The twelve schedules at the end of the document provide important factual details mentioned in various articles on which a schedule is based. All three – articles, parts, and schedules – are interlinked and together delineate the details of various constitutional-legal provisions on various subjects. The es consists of articles 343 to 351, and part 17, titled “Official Language.” It contains a list of scheduled languages, originally fourteen but now expanded to twenty-two. It is important to trace a brief historical trajectory of the events and debates responsible for the insertion of es in the Indian Constitution at its initial stage in order to understand the Indian state’s balance betweeen maintaining the given linguistic diversity on the one hand, and governing and administering the vast multilingual country on the other. A number of nationalist leaders, including Ambedkar, Gandhi, and Nehru, conceptualized different languages as reflecting distinctive historical, cultural, and civilizational roots of the sub-continent, and thus favoured retaining and India’s Language Regime | 207

empowering them with certain constitutional measures (Rani 2004). The Constituent Assembly debates during 1946–49 provide insights on the differing positions among leaders of the new nation in choosing a language policy for the country. For instance, M. Satyanarayan, a member of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, with the permission of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, prepared a list of twelve languages for inclusion in the es (Singh 2006, 41). Nehru added Urdu to this list, arguing that it represented the Indo-Islamic heritage of the country for several hundred years during which Urdu flourished as the pan-Indian language in several different areas. Then, K.M. Munshi, a prominent nationalist leader and a member of the Constituent Assembly of India, argued for the inclusion of Sanskrit as a civilizational language encompassing the entire Indian sub-continent over several centuries, and as the foundational language of several major languages of the country (Thirumalai and Mallikarjun 2006, 6). English, considered an imperial language and identified with British colonial rule, was kept off this list for nationalistic reasons. Another initial concern was to choose languages fit for use in the spheres of administration, communication, culture, education, science, and technology. For example, none of India’s so-called tribal languages were part of the original fourteen languages of the es since they were considered inadequate for government administration. The Constituent Assembly that debated and drafted the Constitution of India did not give a decisive verdict over the criteria for including particular languages in the es . Its discussion mostly centred on three main language issues: whether to make Hindi or Hindustani the country’s official language, and various provisions to promote the chosen language as such; the removal of English as an associate official language after fifteen years in 1965; and adequate constitutional provisions and protection to ensure the survival and growth of various dominant regional and minority languages. The perspective at the time was that with the fourteen languages in the es, the road map was prepared to ensure the gradual addition of other languages with formulation of criteria required on the part of the federal democratic Indian state. Over the years, whether or not a language appears in the es has become a matter of right, identity, prestige, power, and status for various linguistic communities, which has given rise to a large number of demands for inclusion. While the government resolution adopted by the Indian Parliament known as the Official Language Resolution of 1968 spoke of the status of Hindi as the official language of the Union and the need to accelerate its 208 | Asha Sarangi

development, it also reiterated the need to secure the educational and cultural advancement regarding the full development of other languages. The resolution referred to the fourteen languages then included in the es and resolved that the Indian state would take steps for the coordinated development of these languages along with Hindi as the official state language in collaboration with the state governments in independent India. Initially, the fourteen languages included in the schedule were Assamese, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. Sindhi was added in 1967 with the twenty-first amendment of the Indian Constitution, followed by Nepali, Konkani, and Manipuri in 1992.⁴ Bodo, Santhali, Maithili, and Dogri made their way into the es only a decade ago, in 2003. The gradual insertion of these eight languages in the es over the last six decades shows how the Indian state has continued to strike a compromise between recognizing linguistic diversity on the one hand and choosing and institutionalizing a language policy for the country at large on the other hand. Each of these languages has a substantial community of users who have consistently argued for state protection and patronage and been part of larger political movements for separate statehood within India’s linguistic federalism. For example, the demands to create the separate states of Bodoland, Mithilanchal, Konkan Pradesh, and Gorkhaland are based on the identity of Bodo, Maithili, Konkani, and Nepali languages respectively (Thakur 2002). Having these languages in the es ensures that they can be the dominant official language of their respective state and can enjoy several other privileges. There has not been a clear policy whether a language has to be first the official language of a state in India’s federal union before it is included in the es , or vice versa. For example, Konkani entered the es after Goa became a state in 1992. But Sindhi, Urdu, and Sanskrit were included in the es much earlier even without a state of their own. Kashmiri was also included in the schedule from the start without becoming a state language. Both linguistic federalism and the es are closely linked, pathdependent components of India’s language regime (Kamat 1980). T HE E I GHT H S CH ED U LE A N D T H E G O VER N ANCE OF L ANGUAGE S

The languages added to the es gain more than others symbolically, institutionally, socially, and politically. They are used, more often than others, in the spheres of administration, education, occupation, judiciary, and electronic and print mass media. They also acquire salience in cinema, India’s Language Regime | 209

art, cultural spheres, advertisements, business, commerce, market, and regional and national communicative networks. Once a particular language enters the es , it acquires the potential to become the official language of any state in which it dominates. For administrative purposes mainly, the es languages develop as states’ languages of governance in due course. Central and state governments initiate financial incentives and developmental funds, and institutionalize administrative measures, to protect and promote these languages. From time to time, various state and government institutions and agencies consider granting awards or other incentives to promote es languages. Some of the provisions in the Indian Constitution stipulate these languages’ specific administrative powers in the domains of the economy, polity, education, and communication. For example, article 120 mandates, “any member of Indian Parliament can speak in Parliament in his/her mother tongue if s/he speaks in one of the languages of the es ” (Basu 1996, 355). Members can access translation facilities in their own languages within the Parliament during sessions. The Union Public Service Commission (a centralized governmental recruitment agency) stipulates, “every candidate has to appear in one compulsory paper on a modern Indian language and has the option of writing in one of the recognized languages specified in the es ” (Union of Public Service Commission n.d.). Candidates can take one es language as an optional subject in the examination.⁵ Besides this, they can opt to use the same medium of communication that they used in their written examination at the time of an interview. Since the public services examination is an all-India exercise aimed at recruiting administrators, police officers, forest officers, foreign services officials, and other central government officials for employment in various central government departments, it is important to keep its form and character fairly national and above the state-level provincial interests. The es provides a mechanism for balancing conceptions and practices of languages as cultural unifiers of India’s vast social diversity with the need to institutionalize language governance for purposes of national administration. The Ministry of Human Resources Development provides funds to various states and union territories for the development of es languages used in education. The Department of Education within the ministry also provides financial assistance for the publication and purchase of books in Indian languages, and defines Indian languages as languages specified in

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the es .⁶ Unlike the non-scheduled languages, these languages can be used as medium of instruction at the secondary level of education. Furthermore, the Department of Higher Education of mhrd through the Central Institute of Indian Languages provides assistance for the improvement of various languages.⁷ This includes conducting research in the areas of language analysis, language pedagogy, language techniques, and language use in society at large. The two government-run broadcasting and television network agencies, All India Radio and Doordarshan (National Television, popularly known as dd ), encourage artists to perform in these languages and at times also promote their dialectal varieties. The government and other literary bodies use the es as the criterion for selecting a language and its literature on which to confer state honour and recognition. These institutional programs and support are part of the Indian state’s efforts to organize and institutionalize the country’s diverse and dense linguistic multilingualism. This kind of institutional matrix has been an important component in establishing India’s language regime. The presence of some of the es languages on the Indian currency notes has significant symbolic value for their users. The hierarchical mode within which languages are included and excluded from the denominational sites suggests the deeper structures of social inequalities within which languages are embedded and which the es does not address. It is important to see how, why, and when some languages are printed on the national currency whereas others are not. For example, there are only fifteen languages listed on the currency notes at present. This kind of public visibility is also ensured in the Authorized Translations Central Laws Act, 1973, which specifies that the translation of central acts, ordinances, and orders should occur in the es languages. The Ministry of Law, Justice and Company Affairs periodically stipulates and confirms the revised list of languages by adding new ones for translation purposes. However, all twenty-two languages of the es are not yet authorized for translation under this act. T HE E X PA N S I ON O F T H E EI G H T H SCH ED U LE

In the last several years, there have been demands to include thirty-eight more languages in the es . The languages proposed to be included are Angika, Banjara, Bazika, Bhojpuri, Bhoti, Bhotia, Chhattisgarhi, Dhatki, English, Garhwali or Pahari, Gondi, Gujari, Himachali, Ho, Kachhi,

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Kamtapuri, Khasi, Khul, Kodava, Kokborok, Kumaoni, Kurmali, Kurux, Lepcha, Limbu, Magahi, Marwari, Mizo (Lushai), Mundari, Nagpuri, Nicobarese, Pali, Rajasthani, Sambalpuri/Kosli, Shaurseni, Siraiki, Tenyidie, and Tulu. One of the reasons given for this expansion has been that these languages are fully developed and widely spoken, and therefore deserve the recognition and benefits given to those in the es . Non-inclusion of a language in the es is viewed as being equal to non-recognition of the linguistic groups and their cultural identities, rights, and heritage. Since there are no strict and specific criteria laid down for the inclusion of more languages in the es of the Indian Constitution, the government used to treat cases on an individual basis by forming committees to consider the proposals for their inclusion. In October 1996, the Ashok Pahwa Committee was set up for a wider purpose: to develop a set of objective criteria for the addition of more languages to the es .⁸ This committee submitted its report on 30 April 1998 and suggested the following criteria: at least one official language of a state might be included in the es ; a substantial proportion of the population of a particular state should speak it; it should be an independent language and not a dialect or derivative of a language already included in the es ; the Sahitya Akademi (Academy of Literature) should recognize it; and it should have a well-defined and developed literature (Sahitya Akademi n.d.). Following these recommendations, in September 2003, the Ministry of Home Affairs formed another committee under the chairmanship of renowned litterateur Sitakant Mohapatra. This committee further clarified that a language needs at least five million speakers as per the three previous decades’ census reports to be considered spoken by a substantial number of the population, and also suggested that the language in demand has to be in use as the medium of instruction at least until secondary school and preferably at the university level. Furthermore, the language’s script – whether its own, that of the dominant regional language, or the Devanagari script – should have been in use for at least fifty years. The committee also reaffirmed that Sahitya Akademi should be promoting literary activities in the language. Finally, it must be recorded in the census reports as the state’s second dominant language, indicating that it is spoken in a geographically contiguous area and acts as a link language (Mallikarjun 2012, 32). This committee argued that the constitutional provisions do not confer any special status, privilege, or benefit on the speakers of languages included in the es , and that the government was committed to the development of the cultural

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and literary heritage of all languages irrespective of their inclusion. Based on this committee’s recommendations, a cabinet note proposing another committee to consider thirty-eight more languages for inclusion in the es was submitted for the cabinet’s approval. The recommendations of these committees suggest that languages are conceived as central to the idea of community and group identity in India. This can be further discerned from the fact that many of these languages are part of larger political movements demanding separate statehood within the existing larger states, as mentioned above. These demands mostly draw upon an idea of regional linguistic identity as a political identity that specifies a historical and cultural association between language, region, and culture. The demand for more languages to be included in the es reflects languages’ increasing role in the processes of democratization and political mobilization of linguistic identities of various groups and communities in a multilingual country like India. The es ’s expansion can be seen as path-dependent on India’s tradition of democratic pluralism tempered by India’s post-colonial constitutional structures and imperatives oriented toward linguistic rationalization (see Laitin 1989). B E YON D T HE E I G H T H SCH ED U LE: S TAT E A ND L AN G U A G E CO MMU N I T I ES

It is important to look at the constitutional provisions beyond the ambit of the es to understand the set of commitments of the Indian state and its traditions with respect to the question of language rights and identities envisioned under various state policies and programs. The question of linguistic minorities is related to the protection, promotion, and preservation of minority languages against the majority languages’ hegemonic control and political-economic domination (Rao 2008). For example, article 345 in the Indian Constitution states that one or more languages in use in a state in the Indian Union can be declared as the language(s) used for all or any of the official purpose of that state. Article 350 allows any person to ask for the redress of any grievance to any officer or authority of the Union or state in any of the languages used in the Union or that state. Furthermore, article 350-a stipulates that every state and local authority must provide adequate facilities for instruction in the mother tongue in primary school to children belonging to linguistic minority groups. In this regard, the constitution also states that the president may issue such direction to any state

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as is necessary for securing such facilities. It is due to these democratic measures that the Indian state has allowed a number of tribal languages such as Manipuri and Bodo in the es , and made them mediums of instruction in schools in tribal majority areas. However, other tribal languages are not even formally labelled in the census records and reports and other enumerative forums. The Indian census records often euphemistically list them as “other languages” (Sarangi 2009b). These tribal languages are left out of the state patronage and benefits in the realms of education, administration, politics, and the state’s developmental plans. Tribal communities form the majority of linguistic minorities in India and speak more than 400 mother tongues that have been grouped into one hundred languages, of which about twenty-five have more than a hundred thousand speakers each. Several of these tribal languages are also spread across the state boundaries and borders (Sarangi 2009b). In the case of tribal languages (and other marginalized minority languages), India’s democratic pluralism falls short. C ON C LUS I ON

Often language planning and policy in a multilingual country such as India aim to establish pragmatic and effective modes of communication both among different language communities, and also between these communities and the state. The intense linguistic diversity is at times administratively and bureaucratically mapped and managed to accommodate competing language groups’ interests as they demand recognition for their languages and identities. In India, a balance has been sought between retaining linguistic diversity and bringing about relative uniformity of linguistically crafted federal arrangements. Thus, the idea behind language planning is often to expand the use(s) of languages and their functional efficiency in a society. Language policy choices are therefore part of the larger process of multilingual state-society development, as is evident in the Indian case. The Indian Constitution does not specify the official languages the states in the Indian Union must use to conduct their official functions and leaves each free through the process of legislation to adopt Hindi or any other language used in its territory as its official language(s). The language(s) need not be listed in the es and, since independence, several states have adopted official languages that are not es languages. For example, the

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Mizo language in Mizoram; Khasi, Garo, and Jaintia in Meghalaya; and French in Puducherry are not listed in the es . This kind of territorial limit is not an exception in a multilingual country where several languages can exist in common territorial space. The es component of India’s language regime is therefore an attempt to officialize some of these languages. However, certain minority languages, particularly tribal ones, have been adversely affected by this effort as they fail to garner support for es inclusion. It is true that certain criteria – such as having literary traditions and scripts of their own, being spoken by a significant majority of people in geographically contiguous areas, being the dominant language of one or more regions, or having sufficient political support – have been considered important for inclusion in the es . Both the supporters and opponents of candidate languages have continued to raise in Parliament questions of whether or not a particular language is spoken by sufficient number of people, whether it is taught in schools and universities, whether the Sahitya Akademi supports its literary activities, and whether it as per the census reports can become a second language as the link language in that state. An important question that still needs to be probed and analyzed is whether the number of speakers of a language increases once that language is included in the es since people can now identify more easily and legitimately with it. However, it is important to understand how the inclusion and exclusion of languages in the es has created new conflicts by according differential and unequal status, political resources, and sociocultural capital to particular languages. Due to tribal and minority languages’ disadvantageous positions, the es and other components of India’s language regime have at times failed to accommodate and include them in various parts of the country (Munchi and Chakrabarty 1979). In fact, the criteria for selecting some languages for inclusion in the es over others have been marked, more often than not, by contradictions and challenges. Linguists and language planners who support the inclusion of various languages in the es have considered such inclusion a human-rights issue since it is related to the use and preservation of mother tongues of a large section of the people who are otherwise forced to abandon their language and learn the dominant regional language(s). Recognizing languages in the es helps to increase their status in the domains of school education, writing and publishing, print, electronic communication, media, and several other official and non-official domains of the state power. Understanding the path

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dependency of the es over the last several decades reveals the dynamics of the complex relationship between conceptions and practices of language and language use embedded in state traditions and reflected in India’s language regime.

NOTES

1 I am grateful to Linda Cardinal and Selma K. Sonntag, the editors of this volume, for inviting me to contribute. In particular, I owe a special intellectual debt to Selma, as she patiently and generously read and reread the drafts of this chapter and provided valuable suggestions and comments on it at every stage of its preparation. I thank her for the support and encouragement throughout the writing of this chapter. I remain solely responsible for any errors that persist. 2 In addition to the es , the Indian State has also formulated policies such as the three-language formula, bilingual or even trilingual administrative bureaucratic file notings, and most importantly reorganizing the boundaries and borders of states in India’s federal system on a geo-linguistic basis in order to accommodate language pluralism institutionally, politically, and administratively. All of these policies and programs constitute India’s language regime. However, in this chapter, I focus on the es as one of the components of the language regime in contemporary India. 3 A number of governmental departments and ministries are involved in this exercise. Most prominent among them are the following: the Department of Economic Affairs of the Ministry of Finance, the Department of Personnel and Training, the Ministry of Law and Justice, the Legislative Department, the Official Languages Wing of the Department of Official Language, Legal Affairs of the Registrar General of India, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the Secondary and Higher Education of the Ministry of Human Resources Development, the Union Public Service Commission, and the Sahitya Academy. The Central Institute of Indian Languages also assists the language division of the Department of Higher Education of the Ministry of Human Resources Development in collecting information and writing a brief note on various languages before they are submitted for consideration to various ministries. 4 Each of these languages had a long-lasting political and cultural movement behind them with focus on their distinctive identity. The demand for including them in the es was part of these movements (see Singha 2012). 5 The same privilege is accorded to the English language, which can be taken as a subject as well as a medium of examination. 6 Examples of the types of assistance that the Department of Education provides can be gleaned from its budget (see http://indiabudget.nic.in/ub2014-15/eb/ sbe60.pdf ).

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7 For details of the ciil assistance funded by the Department of Higher Education, see http://www.ciil.org/Schemes.aspx and http://mhrd.gov.in/language-education-5. 8 Mr Ashok Pahwa was then the secretary, Department of Official Language, Government of India.

REFERENCES

Basu, Durga D. 1996. Shorter Constitution of India. 12th ed. New Delhi: PrenticeHall of India. Kamat, Anant R. 1980. “Ethno-Linguistic Issues in Federal Context.” Economic and Political Weekly 15 (24/25): 14–21. Khubchandani, Lachman M. 1995. “The Eight Schedule as a Device of Language Engineering.” In Language and the State: Perspectives on the Eighth Schedule, edited by R.S. Gupta, Anvita Abbi, and Kailash S. Aggarwal, 30–48. New Delhi: Creative Books. Laitin, David D. 1989. “Language Policy and Political Strategy in India.” Policy Sciences 22: 415–36. Mallikarjun, B. 2012. “The Evolution of Language Laws in Post-Independence India – A Monograph.” Language in India 12 (September): 1–90. http://www.language inindia.com/sep2012/mallikarjunlanguagemonographfinal.html. Munchi, Surendra, and Tridib Kumar Chakrabarti. 1979. “National Language Policy and the Case for Nepali.” Economic and Political Weekly 14 (15): 701–09. Rani, Asha. 2004. “Language as a Marker of Religious Difference.” In Lived Islam in South Asia: Adaptation, Accommodation and Conflict, edited by Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld, 149–65. Delhi: Social Science Press. Rao, S. Srinivasa. 2008. “India’s Language Debates and Education of Linguistic Minorities.” Economic and Political Weekly 43 (36): 63–9. Sarangi, Asha. 2009a. “Introduction.” In Language and Politics in India, edited by Asha Sarangi, 1–38. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. – 2009b. “Tribal Languages and Cultural Politics in India.” Special issue, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 9 (1): 123–9. Sahitya Akademi. n.d. “About Us.” Accessed 4 November 2012. http://sahitya-akademi.gov.in/sahitya-akademi/aboutus/about.jsp. Singh, Udaya Narayan. 2006. “Status of Lesser Known Languages in India.” In Lesser-Known Languages of South Asia: Status and Policies, Case-Studies and Applications of Information Technology, edited by Anju Saxena and Lars Borin, 31–59. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Singha, M. Ningamba. 2012. “Manipuri Language in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution.” Pratidhwani: A Journal of Humanities and Social Science 1 (2): 256–72. Thakur, Manish Kumar. 2002. “The Politics of Minority Languages: Some Reflections on the Maithili Language Movement.” Journal of Social and Economic Development 4 (2): 199–211. India’s Language Regime | 217

Thirumalai, M.S., and B. Mallikarjun. 2006. “Adopting a Constitution for a Nation: The Last Days of the Constituent Assembly of India and the Adoption of Language Provisions.” Language in India 6 (March). http://www.languageinindia. com/march2006/assemblywork.html. Union Public Service Commission. n.d. “Frequently Asked Questions regarding Examinations.” Union Public Service Commission, Government of India. Accessed 14 June 2014. http://www.upsc.gov.in/general/faq.htm.

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12 State Tradition, Language, and Education Policies in France¹ N U R I A GA R C IA

“Tous nos lycéens doivent devenir bilingues et, pour certains, trilingues. Cela sera un avantage décisif pour vous dans le 21ème siècle.”² This sentence from the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy during the launch of the 2009 high school reform clearly illustrates a shift in the language teaching objectives assigned to the French education system. While the national education system was historically an important component in the linguistic unification of France and the spread of the national language over the whole territory, in the contemporary context the teaching of foreign languages has become one of this system’s central missions. The need to provide all citizens with foreign language skills is not only explicitly asserted by policy-makers, politicians, and education officials alike, but also reflects a social demand from the population at large. While similar phenomena exist in many European countries, there is significant variation in the policies implemented to reach the objective of multilingualism. Language education policies vary in their choice of languages to be taught inside the education system and the specific status awarded to each. In this sense, “the school institution … is a powerful political instrument in so far as it ensures (in parallel or in competition with private companies) mass language teaching. The choices that operate therein are determinant for the legitimization of linguistic varieties, according to whether for example they are taught or not, and according the form of the teaching adopted” (Beacco and Cherkaoui Messin 2010, 95, my translation).³ Paradoxically, the shape of the multilingualism promoted by the French education system appears to be based neither on the existing language skills of the population present on the French territory,

nor on an evaluation of the country’s actual language needs. While the objective of multilingualism has become largely consensual, a hiatus exists between the limited recognition of the existing language diversity among the French population and on the French territory on the one hand, and the theoretical multilingual citizen the education system is meant to produce on the other. Building on existing literature and a comprehensive analysis of policy documents; press archives; and expert interviews with education officials at different levels, language teachers’ associations, and teachers’ unions, in this chapter I show that this hiatus between the actual and the theoretical multilingual citizen is linked to the enduring effect of French state traditions on foreign language education policies. These state traditions operate through path-dependence mechanisms (Pierson 2000) and through the persistence of a linguistic ideology in which languages are framed as intrinsically linked to a nation-state. In the first section, I show that despite France’s continued self-understanding as a monolingual nation-state, there has been a significant shift in the objectives assigned to national education policies under the pressure of globalization and Europeanization. In the second section, I argue that this shift is made possible through the existence of a democratic consensus around the notion of multilingualism, and through the principles of parental free choice and diversification, which ensure that the implementation of the objective of multilingualism remains compatible with the Jacobin state tradition. In the third section, I explain how through the persistence of an association of language to a given nation-state in the very definition of a (foreign) language, French state traditions continue to shape the language regime governing contemporary language education policies in France. FR OM T HE P R ODU CT I O N O F A MO N O LI N G U A L TO A MULT I LI NGUA L CI T I ZEN France’s Monolingual State Tradition

In the literature on language and politics, France is generally considered an ideal-typical homogeneous, monolingual nation-state in which the borders of state, nation, and language tend to coincide. The French state has used language in its attempts to achieve political and cultural unification

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(Baggioni 1997, 224). From the Jacobin language policies implemented during the French Revolution to the creation of a centralized education system under the Third Republic, state intervention progressively led to the superposition of the linguistic boundaries with those of the nation-state (Safran 1999). However, the vision of France as a monolingual nation-state refers more to a political representation constantly reproduced by the state itself than to an empirical description of the sociological reality. Historians have nuanced the assumed success of the Jacobin language imposition policies by showing that at the end of the nineteenth century a large percentage of the population still did not speak French (Weber 1976; see also Harguindéguy and Itçaina this volume). More generally, scholars have underlined that no political space is ever sociolinguistically homogeneous, and that political, national, and linguistic borders are never completely congruent (Laponce 1984). Nevertheless, the ideal of the monolingual citizen can be considered as constituent of both French state tradition and the concomitant language regime. The dominant French state tradition can be understood to refer to the French Republican conception of citizenship and nationality that continues to shape dominant representations. The core elements of this conception include the indivisibility of the nation and the direct link between the citizen and the state that transcends all particular identities and belongings, thus limiting the recognition of group rights. Language regimes can be defined as the practices and conceptions of language and language use projected through state policies, and as acted upon by language users (see Sonntag and Cardinal this volume). State tradition and language regime are intrinsically linked: the French “linguistic ideology” consists of “erecting the French language as the quasi-religion of the state, and national unilingualism as the founding principle of the unity and indivisibility of the nation itself ” (Encrevé 2007, 126, my translation).⁴ This ideology grew after the French Revolution, most famously through the Barère report on idioms in 1794 and the Report on the Necessity and the Means to Annihilate Patois and Universalize the Use of the French Language by the abbé Grégoire (Certeau, Julia, and Revel 1975). The national education system has perpetuated it since Jules Ferry introduced compulsory schooling in the 1880s. France’s self-understanding as a monolingual nation-state has continuously shaped the state’s various language policies. A number of more recent measures confirm this linguistic ideology: the 1992 inscription of French as language of the Republic in the second

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article of the constitution; the 1994 Toubon law, “the most notorious of France’s linguistic protection measures … which decreed that French must be used in education, commerce, the media, the workplace, public service and conferences” (Edelstein 2003, 1,127); the strengthening of language requirements for obtaining French citizenship, etc. In the same way, the (constitutional) debates surrounding the ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, “shows how the implementation of linguistic human rights is particularly difficult in a country whose traditions see uniformity, rather than the existence of different groups, as a guarantee for equality and a functioning democracy” (Määttä 2005, 177). Language education policies, however, have undergone significant change: the national education system, which was historically one of the main instruments for realizing the ideal of this linguistically homogeneous nation-state, now provides French pupils with foreign language skills. In a context marked by globalization and European integration, a growing consensus has emerged around public education systems’ responsibility to provide foreign language skills to all citizens. Similar trends can be observed in most European countries, with governments allocating more and more public funds to encourage citizens to teach and learn languages that are different from their state’s national language. This raises the question of how the implementation of such a policy shift was possible in a country like France, where a Jacobin Republican state tradition continues to constrain language policy choices. Toward the Production of the Multilingual Citizen: A Shi in Language Policy Objectives

The shift in the national education system’s policy objectives can be conceptualized as a transition from the production of the monolingual citizen, the traditional state object, to that of the multilingual citizen, the new policy objective in a context marked by globalization and European integration. Drawing on works that analyze public policies as producing a given model of citizenship (Duchesne and Muller 2003), the notion of the monolingual citizen and of the multilingual citizen are constructed as ideal-types in the Weberian sense and refer to policy objectives that correspond to a specific world-historical context and age of the nation-state building process. In this perspective, the monolingual citizen corresponds

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to the model of citizenship defended during the construction phase of the nation-states in Europe in the nineteenth century, marked by a project of linguistic and cultural unification, whereas the multilingual citizen corresponds to the contemporary restructuring phase, marked by increased transnationalization under the effect of processes of globalization and European integration (Zürn and Leibfried 2005). Indicators for this transition include the shift of policy objectives in the field of language education as well as the framing of these measures in policy-makers’ and social actors’ discourses. In France, the transition from the production of the monolingual to that of the multilingual citizen results not only from an explicit change in policy objectives, but also partly from more general educational reforms. The progressive extension of foreign language learning to all pupils is linked to the extension of compulsory schooling until the age of sixteen and the implementation of a common program for all pupils in compulsory secondary education with the creation of the collège unique in the 1970s. This program has come to include a substantial part of foreign language learning: in France in 2005–06, 16.3 per cent of total class hours in compulsory secondary education and 4.3 per cent in primary school were allocated to foreign languages (Eurydice 2008, 100). Other language education policy reforms express the explicit intention to develop the population’s language skills and encourage pupils’ multilingualism. For example, France introduced early language learning at the beginning of the 1990s, with the idea that multilingualism is easier to achieve if one starts to learn foreign languages at a very early age. This policy is part of a larger trend at the European level, where foreign language learning is seen as part of the values, norms, and knowledge to be conveyed to all future citizens. The extension of the classes bilangues, which allow students to have an increased volume of hours in not only a first but also a second foreign language (in most cases English and German) in Grades 6 and 7, is another policy that seeks to enhance the population’s multilingualism. Further efforts to explicitly encourage multilingualism in France were also expressed in the Plan for the Renovation of Foreign Language Teaching (Ministère de l’Éducation nationale, 2006) in 2005 and in the Ministry of Education’s creation of a “strategic committee for languages” in 2011. The emphasis on the need to extend foreign language learning to all citizens has however in no way led to toning down the insistence on the

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centrality of the French language, and the transition from the production of the monolingual to that of the multilingual citizen remains heavily shaped by the traditional vision of the monolingual French citizen. A N A MB I GUOUS CO N SEN SU S A R O U N D T H E MULTILINGUAL CITIZE N

While the idea of the multilingual citizen has become increasingly widely accepted, conflicting definitions of the notion of multilingualism are defended by different social actors, in function of their perceptions of interests, ideologies, beliefs, and pedagogical conceptions. Building on the concept of “ambiguous consensus,” I argue that precisely this ambivalence has allowed multilingualism to become consensual, despite the Jacobin Republican state tradition’s enduring effect. The fact that a policy is widely supported does not necessarily imply that all actors agree on its goals. In institutional configurations where debates engage representatives of different social groups, policies need on the contrary to be sufficiently polysemous to be supported by actors with divergent interests (Palier 1999, 563). This is the case in French foreign language education policies, where the actors involved include organized stakeholders such as teachers unions and language teachers associations, as well as individual citizens such as students and their parents. Ambiguities in the Definition of Multilingualism

The consensus around multilingualism is visible through the absence of partisan conflict and the absence of opposition among different types of actors on the issue. With slight shifts in emphasis, both right- and left-wing parties and governments are indeed currently defending the objective of multilingualism. Various social actors (teachers unions and organizations, employers and private economic actors, pupils and their parents, etc.) as well as the general public also largely defend it: in a 2005 Eurobarometer survey, 83 per cent of the respondents in France consider that “knowing other languages than their mother tongue is or could be useful for them personally” (European Commission 2006, 28). The ambiguity in the consensus around the multilingual citizen concerns various dimensions: first, the scope of the multilingualism to be implemented (how many and which languages should be taught?) remains vague. Second, the desired outcome (bilingualism, trilingualism, interlin-

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guistic comprehension?) is not clearly specified. Third, the reasons multilingualism is important (economic, political, or cultural?) vary strongly in the discourses held by different types of actors. Among these dimensions, the last question is the least divisive, as various types of justifications are simply put side by side. Depending on the context, discourses that defend multilingualism emphasize the individual benefits of foreign language learning (increasing one’s chances on the job market, gaining access to other cultures, study and travel abroad, etc.) or the aggregate benefits, with multilingualism being presented as part of a larger societal project for France, Europe, or the world (increasing France’s competitiveness on the international level, furthering European integration, promoting peace among peoples, etc.). As these framings are not mutually exclusive, the juxtaposition of individual and collective arguments for multilingualism, as well as economic and cultural justifications, gives the impression of a consensus, although the central motivations for supporting multilingualism vary strongly among the different social actors concerned. The question of the shape of the multilingualism to be implemented, and to a lesser extent that of the desired outcome, are more prone to conflict, but the principles of “parental free choice” and “language diversification” have allowed circumventing potential disagreements. Parental Free Choice and Language Diversification

Successive French governments have constantly reaffirmed the principle of “parental free choice” to avoid taking a clear position on which languages should be compulsory for all pupils. In particular, the question of which policy measures to adopt in reaction to the increasingly predominant position of English in foreign language teaching is a potentially divisive issue. In 1947, the suggestion of the Langevin-Wallon report to make English lessons compulsory for all students was rapidly discarded and the principle of parental free choice confirmed (Doublier 2005, 139). On the other hand, at the beginning of the 1990s, Minister of Education Jack Lang advanced the idea of prohibiting the teaching of English in primary school, which was also abandoned (National education inspector general, unpublished interview 2011). In 2004, the Commission for a National Debate on the Future of the Education System presided over by Claude Thélot was criticized for suggesting that the learning of “English of international communication” be counted among the “fundamentals” to be transmitted to all pupils. As a

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consequence, this proposal was not taken up by the subsequent Fillon education law adopted in 2005, which referred to “one foreign language” instead of English specifically. Later policies explicitly tried only to promote German in the framework of bilateral cultural agreements between France and Germany. However, at no moment have these measures questioned the principle of parental free choice. Some authors go as far as to accuse the French governments’ non-intervention as tacit support for a policy promoting English that is carried out by the parents. Pierre Encrevé (2007, 134, my translation) thus considers parents’ anxieties, which he qualifies as a “sociological constraint,” as “an instrument which those who govern have been using very well for forty years, volens nolens, to progressively make English the common international language of the French.”⁵ At the same time, the principle of diversification of the foreign languages taught in the French education system, introduced in 1970, has encouraged the learning of languages other than English without encroaching on parental free choice. As pupils massively opt for English as a first foreign language, making a second language compulsory appears to be an efficient means to promote learning other languages. The principle of language diversification appears to respond primarily to language teachers’ concerns rather than those of pupils and their parents. An analysis of press archives shows that diversification initially served to settle a conflict between the Ministry of Education and teachers unions: in 1970, a reform making the learning of a second language no longer compulsory but optional led to intense protest from language teachers who feared that this measure would entail the suppression of teaching positions for languages other than English. As a counterpart to the reform, Minister of Education Olivier Guichard introduced a “plan for the diversification of foreign language teaching,” which stated that five foreign languages (including English) should be taught in each district and thus also guaranteed a number of positions for German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish teachers.⁶ Progressively extended and reinterpreted, the principle of diversification has been reaffirmed ever since in various policy documents and reports, and the compulsory second foreign language continues to be used to encourage pupils to learn languages other than English. Through the principles of parental free choice and diversification, France’s defence of multilingualism has not granted a specific status to any language in particular but only to foreign languages in general, thus creating a large consensus between the different actors. It is unlikely that

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more constraining policy options, such as setting a fixed order in which languages should be learned or making English compulsory for all pupils, would have encountered the same degree of acceptance. In this sense, the shift in language education policy was possible, since it remained to a certain extent consistent with both French state tradition and also French conceptions of language: while learning foreign languages is encouraged in general, specific rights continue to be conferred to French only (Von Busekist 2007, 113). T HE DI F F E R E NT I A L R ECO G N I T I O N O F L A N GUAGE S BY THE NATIONAL E DUC AT I ON SYST EM

The enduring impact of state traditions on foreign language education policies remains visible in the very definition of what constitutes a language and which languages should be taught in the education system. Currently fifty-seven languages can in theory be evaluated in the final high school exam, the baccalauréat, but these do not all have the same status. The differential treatment of these languages is the product of path-dependence mechanisms linked to the history of the institutionalization of foreign language education in France and Europe. The categorizations used to qualify the different languages moreover illustrate how the French state perceives them, and conveys them to French citizens and society. The Persistence of Nation-State Framing in Foreign Language Education in Europe

The persistence of a strong nation-state framing is first of all visible in the education system’s categorization and recognition of different languages. The notion of multilingualism that policy-makers defend refers primarily, if not exclusively, to so-called foreign languages. A closer look shows that this label implicitly refers to other countries’ national or state languages. This illustrates the persistence of a cognitive framing that ties language to a sovereign nation-state and the presence of forms of “thin nationalism” in the very definition of what a language is. With languages being recognized “on the grounds of their relating to entrenched cultural identities, as long as these are the identities of nation-states” (Kraus 2008, 69), the category of foreign languages implicitly legitimizes the organization of the world into nations, which is seen as natural or evident (Billig 1995).

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This nation-state framing is linked to the context of institutionalization of foreign language education in Europe, in which diplomatic relations play a central role. While at the end of the nineteenth century, foreign language teaching was seen as part of foreign policy in a context of increased economic competition between European nations (Mombert 1998), since World War ii it has been perceived as a tool for reconciling the nations formerly at war and creating a European political community. In 1954, the member states of the Council of Europe thus committed themselves to “encourage the study by its own nationals of the languages history and civilization of the Contracting Parties” and to promote the study of their languages to the citizens of the other countries (Council of Europe 1954). Diplomatic relations continue to play an important part in language education, as the teaching of foreign languages in France is also a way to encourage the learning of French abroad. One national education official goes so far as to state, “given the importance of diplomatic relations, it is not the domestic impulse on needs that pilots language policies and diversification in France, it is the balance of power between diplomatic relations” (National education inspector general, unpublished interview 2011). In a 2011 report aimed at reducing the number of languages to be examined at the baccalauréat, bilateral commitments toward other eu member states clearly outweigh pupils’ demands: the report thus suggests removing the six so-called oriental languages, although Hebrew and Turkish were chosen as an elective by more than 1,000 pupils in 2010, while preserving the twelve European languages, although there were less than twenty candidates for Danish and less than fifty for Finnish the same year (Ministère de l’Éducation nationale 2011). The link between foreign and education policies being a sensitive subject, most education officials are however careful to underline the Ministry of Education’s autonomy and the primacy of pupils’ needs over diplomatic considerations. The distinction between European and international languages used in different policy reports is also significant. First, the geographical concentration on Europe is striking: Chinese and Japanese are the only Asian languages, and Arabic the only African language, that pupils can choose as their first foreign language. This tends to confirm that French foreign language education policies are guided by a Europe-centred tradition much more than an evaluation of the country’s language needs. Second, among the languages spoken on the European continent, only those of the twelve “old” Western European member states qualify as “European

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languages.” Eastern European languages (with the exception of Polish) are referred to as “living languages” and grouped together with African and Asian languages. The multilingual citizen the French education system aims to produce thus continues to be conceived in reference to a Western European-centred system of nations. At the same time, phenomena of denationalization can be observed for certain languages, which have become standards of international communication. This is the case for English, which has become more and more dissociated from British culture and civilization, but also for Chinese, which is increasingly seen as a language of the future international economy rather than as one that allows access to a distinct culture. The changing perception toward Chinese is visible in the 2012 Eurobarometer language survey: 28 per cent of the French respondents mention Chinese as the language that children should learn as it will be useful for their future, which represents an increase of twenty-three percentage points compared to the 2005 survey (European Commission 2012, 89). All Languages Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal than Others

While this Europe-centred framing of language is observable in many European countries, other differences are linked more specifically to the French Jacobin state tradition. This is the case of regional languages and so-called immigrant languages. Although the overall trend points toward the integration of these languages into the general scheme of foreign language learning, certain limitations persist and past framings continue to shape present perceptions. In particular, debates about regional languages’ status remain divisive and marked by a high degree of symbolic violence, visible for instance in the conflicts around the ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Meanwhile, immigrant languages are rarely the object of public debates and suffer rather from an absence of consideration. The term “immigrant languages” generally refers to those that are or have been taught under the Enseignement de langue et de culture d’origine (elco , Language and culture of origin courses) scheme. Introduced between 1973 and 1981, elco designates a program based on bilateral agreements between France and eight countries of emigration: Algeria, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. Its initial objective was to offer courses in migrants’ language of origin to their children

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in order to allow them to return to their parents’ country of origin. Organized mainly at the primary school level, these classes take place during or outside regular school hours with teachers trained and paid by the country of origin. Ever since it became clear that the majority of migrants’ children would not return to their country of origin but envisioned their future lives in France, the benefits of this marginal scheme have been questioned. The High Council for Integration thus recommended in its 1995 report that “a real teaching of these languages as foreign languages, and not as languages of origin is desirable” (quoted in Tietze 2005, 223, my translation).⁷ While the languages taught under the elco scheme have been progressively integrated in the general foreign language education program, a divide exists again between European languages and those spoken on other continents. Indeed, “European integration has led to privileging very strongly the learning of the largest European languages” (Levallois 2009, 7, my translation).⁸ Spanish and Italian, in particular, have been fully integrated into mainstream foreign language teaching, whereas Portuguese continues to be seen mainly as an immigrant language (Peruchi 2010). This stereotype is even stronger in the cases of Turkish and Arabic: although pupils can in theory chose either as compulsory first foreign language, the immigrant language stigma leads to negative social perceptions and a weak demand by pupils’ parents, which has entailed very few classes in these languages. The case of Arabic is the most striking: although it is used by more than five million people living on the French territory, less than 0.1 per cent of pupils learn it inside the school system. Jacques Legendre, president of the Commission for Culture, Education and Communication for the French Senate and author of various reports on foreign language teaching, thus notes that Arabic “suffers from stereotypes confining it to the role of language of a country of origin and religious language, which favours a communitarian fall back detrimental to intercultural dialogue” (Legendre 2009, 2,344). This negative stereotype also influences heads of schools in their decision to offer Arabic classes, and different actors, including the inspector general for Arabic, have accused the education system of “abandoning” it. Arabic’s trajectory indeed stands in stark contrast to those of other elco languages. In 2009, only 8,700 pupils learned Arabic inside the national education system, while more than 50,000 learned it under the elco scheme (Levallois 2009, 7). This reality conveys that learning Arabic is useful only for migrants’ children and continues to shape per-

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ceptions that devalue the learning of Arabic, thus reproducing existing hierarchies in terms of culture and geopolitics linked to France’s colonial past in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Although a 2002 report by the High Council for Integration stresses that integrating elco languages into foreign language teaching would allow “the nation to enrich its linguistic heritage” (quoted in Petek 2004, 46, my translation),⁹ Arabic is not perceived as representing a positive contribution to France’s cultural diversity. Different authors point out that the perspective of developing the teaching of Arabic in public schools sparked reservations and even outright hostility from different parts of the public (Messaouidi 2013, 12). A progressive but limited integration in the general scheme of foreign language education is also visible for so-called regional languages. In 1951, the adoption of the Deixonne law first allowed the teaching of “local languages and dialects” on an optional basis, but it was only the 1975 Haby education law that led to the institutionalization of the categorization “regional languages and cultures” still in use today (Beacco and Cherkaoui Messin 2010, 103). While certain authors link regional languages’ increased recognition in France to Europeanization (Scheidhauer 2001), others argue that the French central state’s change in attitude toward regional languages results from internal dynamics and mobilizations (Harguindéguy and Cole 2009, 963; see also Harguindéguy and Itçaina this volume). Today eight regional languages have the status of second foreign language in the national education system: Basque, Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Creole, Occitan, Tahitian, and the Melanesian languages. Nevertheless, these languages are far from mainstream. Regional languages have little space in the system’s three-language model, which encourages learning French and two foreign languages – usually English and another European language. Interviews with concerned actors confirm that regional languages are systematically “forgotten” and that their defence requires permanent vigilance (National education inspector general for regional cultures and languages, unpublished interview 2012). Moreover, they still cannot be chosen as first foreign language. The persistence of a nation-state framing that limits the full recognition of regional language teaching thus operates in a double sense: regional languages’ status in the national education system is inferior to that of French, the language of the Republic, since they are not allowed as teaching languages. At the same time, they do not fully benefit from foreign-language status either: although some regional languages can be chosen as second foreign language, the category

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“first foreign language” remains limited to the national languages of other European nation-states. It is also significant that regional languages can only be chosen as optional languages and that they continue to be strictly regulated in education. Bilingual sections are especially closely monitored, as immersion methods are prohibited in public schools, following the Conseil d’État’s 2002 ruling (Bertucci 2006, 102). This translates into a continued suspicion toward regional languages, which are still seen as potentially divisive and linked to past conflicts. Beacco and Cherakaoui Messin (2010, 107, my translation) note, “in addition to reactivating the spectre of the balkanization of the nation, regional languages constitute neither a modern and reasonable choice, nor a desirable option for national education.”¹⁰ The teaching of regional languages is seen as a turn toward the past rather than the future, and is framed in terms of the preservation of cultural heritage rather than the transmission of knowledge valuable for pupils’ future lives. This past-oriented frame is visible even in measures that recognize these languages, such as the adoption in 2008 of article 75-1 of the constitution, which states, “regional languages belong to France’s heritage.” C ON C LUS I ON

While the extension of foreign language teaching to all citizens has become a consensual policy objective, the conceptualization of the multilingual citizen the French education system aims to produce remains heavily shaped by French state tradition. This tradition operates on the one hand through path dependence, with the entrenchment of Jacobin Republicanism during France’s nation-building era continuing to limit the policy choices and instruments available to reach the new objective of multilingualism, and on the other hand through representations of the monolingual French – and more largely European – citizen, where language continues to be associated to a given nation-state. State traditions are reinforced by different governments’ policy choices and the education system’s differential recognition of distinct types of languages. These policy choices indeed indicate the status and the utility of different languages to French citizens and society. At the same time, these state traditions do not function as a simple top-down mechanism; the demands and the choices made by individual citizens, and by society at large,

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also help produce and reproduce a certain conception of language and foreign language learning. As a consequence, the ideal-typical multilingual citizen the national education system produces is in the vast majority of cases a French native speaker who knows one international language of large diffusion, i.e., English and increasingly Chinese, and one larger European language, such as German, Italian, or Spanish. The actual multilingualism of a large proportion of the French population, while increasingly tolerated and integrated into general foreign language education, continues however to be seen as backward, a preservation of an individual cultural identity that is not to extend to all citizens.

NOTES

1 Funded by the Fonds National de la Recherche, Luxembourg. 2 “All our high school students must become bilingual, and some will need to become trilingual. This will be a decisive advantage for you in the twenty-first century” (my translation). 3 “L’institution scolaire … est un puissant instrument politique dans la mesure où elle assure (en parallèle ou en concurrence avec des entreprises privées) des enseignements langagiers de masse. Les choix qui y sont opérés sont déterminants pour la légitimation des variétés linguistiques, selon par exemple qu’elles sont enseignées ou non, et selon les formes d’enseignement adoptées” (Beacco and Cherkaoui Messin 2010, 95). 4 “L’idéologie linguistique française … consiste à ériger la langue française en quasireligion d’État et l’unilinguisme national en principe fondateur de l’unité et de l’indivisibilité de la nation elle-même” (Encrevé 2007, 126). 5 “C’est pourtant un instrument dont les gouvernants se sont très bien servis depuis quarante ans, volens nolens, pour faire peu à peu de l’anglais la langue internationale commune des Français” (Encrevé 2007, 134). 6 In 1970, Metropolitan France was divided into 408 districts. 7 “Un véritable enseignement de ces langues en tant que langue étrangère et non d’origine est souhaitable” (quoted in Tietze 2005, 223). 8 “La construction de l’Europe a pour effet de privilégier très fortement l’apprentissage des plus grandes langues européennes” (Levallois 2009, 7). 9 “L’évolution des Elco vers un enseignement de langues vivantes permettant aux jeunes de tirer parti de leur héritage familial et à la nation d’enrichir son patrimoine linguistique” (Petek 2004, 46).

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10 “En plus de réactiver le spectre de l’éclatement de la Nation, les langues régionales ne constituent ni un choix moderne et raisonnable, ni une option souhaitable pour l’Éducation nationale” (Beacco and Cherkaoui Messin 2010, 107).

REFERENCES

Baggioni, Daniel. 1997. Langues et nations en Europe. Paris: Payot & Rivages. Beacco, Jean-Claude, and Kenza Cherkaoui Messin. 2010. “Les politiques linguistiques européennes et la gestion de la diversité des langues en France.” Langue française 167 (3): 95–111. Bertucci, Marie-Madeleine. 2006. “Chronique ‘linguistique’: Langues de France et didactique du français.” Le Français aujourd’hui 153 (2): 99–105. Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Certeau, Michel de, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel. 1975. Une politique de la langue: La Révolution française et les patois. Paris: Gallimard. Council of Europe. 1954. European Cultural Convention. Paris, 19. xii . European Treaty Series no. 18. Doublier, Caroline. 2005. “Enseignement de l’allemand et image de l’Allemagne depuis la Seconde Guerre mondiale.” Histoire de l’éducation 106: 137–52. Duchesne, Sophie, and Pierre Muller. 2003. “Représentations croisées de l’État et des citoyens.” In Être gouverné: Études en l’honneur de Jean Leca, edited by Pierre Favre, Yves Schemeil, and Jack Hayward, 35–51. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Edelstein, Elizabeth Manera. 2003. “The Loi Toubon: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, but Only on France’s Terms.” Emory International Law Review 17 (3): 1,127–202. Encrevé, Pierre. 2007. “Conditions d’exercice d’une politique linguistique en démocratie aujourd’hui: Notes sur le cas français.” In Politiques et usages de la langue en Europe, edited by Michael Werner, 121–36. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’Homme. European Commission. 2006. “Europeans and Their Languages.” Special Eurobarometer 243. http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_243_en.pdf. – 2012. “Europeans and Their Languages.” Special Eurobarometer 386. http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_386_en.pdf. Eurydice. 2008. “Key Data on Teaching Languages at School in Europe 2008.” http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/education/eurydice/documents/key_data_series/ 095EN.pdf. Harguindéguy, Jean-Baptiste, and Alistair Cole. 2009. “La politique linguistique de la France à l’épreuve des revendications ethnoterritoriales.” Revue française de science politique 59 (5): 939–66. Kraus, Peter A. 2008. A Union of Diversity: Language, Identity and Polity-Building in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laponce, Jean. 1984. Langue et territoire. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval. Legendre, Jacques. 2009. Written question n°10391, jo Sénat, 8.10.2009.

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Levallois, Bruno. 2009. “L’enseignement de l’arabe dans l’institution scolaire française.” Langues et cité: Bulletin de l’observatoire des pratiques linguistiques (15): 6–7. Määttä, Simo K. 2005. “The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, French Language Laws, and National Identity.” Language Policy 4 (2): 167–86. Messaoudi, Alain. 2013. “L’arabe à l’école, une langue mal-aimée.” Plein droit 98: 12–15. Ministère de l’Éducation nationale. 2006. “Rénovation de l’enseignement des langues vivantes étrangères.” Bulletin officiel 23: 1,097–106. – 2011. Propositions pour une évolution du baccalauréat: Rapport conjoint de l’inspection générale de l’éducation nationale et de l’inspection générale de l’administration de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche. Paris: Ministère de l’Éducation nationale, décembre. Mombert, Monique. 1998. “L’enseignement de l’allemand en France et du français en Allemagne après 1870, 1918 et 1945.” In Nachkriegsgesellschaften in Deutschland und Frankreichim 20. Jahrhundert = Sociétés d’après-guerre en France et en Allemagne au 20e siècle, edited by Ilja Mieck and Pierre Guillen, 161–74. München: R. Oldenbourg. Palier, Bruno. 1999. “Réformer la sécurité sociale: Les interventions gouvernementales en matière de protection sociale depuis 1945: La France en perspective comparative.” Doctoral thesis, Institut d’Études Politiques. Peruchi, Ingrid Bueno. 2010. “La politique plurilingue française et la place du portugais: Quels statuts, quels arguments, quelles réalités pour la construction d’un imaginaire sur la langue?” Plural pluriel – Revue des cultures de langue portugaise (7). http://www.pluralpluriel.org/index.php?option=com_content&view= article&id=277:la-politique-plurilingue-francaise-et-la-place-du-portugaisquels-statuts-quels-arguments-quelles-realites-pour-la-construction-dunimaginaire-sur-la-langue-&catid=77:numero-7-langue-voix-cultures& Itemid=55. Petek, Gaye. 2004. “Les Elco, entre reconnaissance et marginalisation.” Hommes et migrations 1,252: 45–55. Pierson, Paul. 2000. “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics.” American Political Science Review 94 (2): 251–67. Safran, William. 1999. “Politics and Language in Contemporary France: Facing Supranational and Infranational Challenges.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 137: 39–66. Scheidhauer, Christophe. 2001. “Comment la défense des langues régionales est devenue une politique européenne.” In L’opinion européenne, edited by Dominique Reynié, and Bruno Cautrès, 65–84. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Tietze, Nikola. 2005. “La politique de la langue: Entre intégration et reconnaissance de la différence.” In Les codes de la différence: Race – origine – religion. France – Allemagne – États-Unis, edited by Riva Kastoryano, 203–35. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.

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Von Busekist, Astrid. 2007. “Cannibales et gourmets: Quelques recettes d’équilibre linguistique.” In Politiques et usages de la langue en Europe, edited by Michael Werner, 101–19. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme. Weber, Eugen Joseph. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France: 1870–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zürn, Michael, and Stephan Leibfried. 2005. “Reconfiguring the National Constellation.” European Review 13 (5): 1–36.

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13 The Language Politics of Peace-Building¹ CATH E R I N E BAK E R

In this chapter, I make an initial foray into an understudied but significant area of research: the language politics of peace-building – intervention to create the conditions for a lasting peace. The importance of languages in peace operations, namely in their military aspects, has already been identified through the work of a project (in which I participated) led by Hilary Footitt and Michael Kelly (2012). This research called attention to the challenges of establishing operational language support at short notice, the issues faced by heritage speakers in foreign militaries who take part in operations in their country of origin, the impact of recruiting local language intermediaries on the local society and economy, the collectivizing ways in which trust is determined operationally, the importance of professionalizing language support, and the need for interoperability between armed forces and military personnel from different states (Kelly and Baker 2013). Interoperability requires formal agreement on working language(s) across a coalition. This language is nearly always English,² and indeed nato ’s pathway to membership includes English language training for candidate states’ armed forces to make them more effective contributors to nato missions (Hare and Fletcher 2012). In practice, this formally chosen working language is often supplemented by other informally choosen working languages when more convenient for troops. The late-1990s nato force in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for instance, contained a brigade formed of battalions from several Nordic countries and Poland plus platoons from the three Baltic States, which officially used English to communicate with each other. Informally, Russian served as an extra working language used by Baltic troops to communicate among themselves, and by Danish officers

who had been trained in Russian during the Cold War to communicate with Baltic officers (Kelly and Baker 2013, 173–6). The language regimes of the states that contribute troops to military missions have an effect on interoperability. However, military missions are only one dimension of the activities and practices that, in the context of post-conflict response, comprise peace-building. This broader work is carried out through complex interactions between many United Nations agencies, international financial institutions, offices of relevant regional intergovernmental organizations, national development agencies, and ngo s, turning each separate peace-building intervention into “a distinct alphabet soup of organizational acronyms” (Paris 2004, 19). Though each intervention has a different organizational structure, the strategy is the same from case to case: to establish a free market economy and a viable democracy, including an independent civil society, in pursuit of the stability which the “liberal peace thesis” in international relations holds will be achieved once those preconditions are met (Paris 2004, 19–37). This rests on a universal peace-building model that will face challenges peculiar to each country but is intended to produce the same results in each, as long as the formed or reconstructed state develops within certain parameters thought conducive to a liberal peace (Richmond 2010). Two questions about language policy choices and states during peace-building therefore suggest themselves. The first, as the introductory example of military coalitions and interoperability illustrates, relates to the interveners: what are the language regimes of the composite entities that carry out peace-building interventions, and exert significant power within the sites of intervention even though they are not states? The second relates to the new states themselves. What kinds of language regimes does intervention make them likely to adopt? Both the politics of peace-building and the politics of global English must be considered in order to begin answering these questions. L A NGUA GE P OLI T I CS A N D P O ST- CO N F LI CT PE ACE -BUILDING

Peace-building in its contemporary sense involves managing a number of processes and establishing a number of institutions that, together, are thought to predispose a state and society to function as a liberal market democracy. Peace-building is a critical juncture for the state, and usually follows another critical juncture, armed conflict, which may have dras-

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tically altered the state’s governance, territory, or rationale; however, its desired outcomes are largely shaped by external actors, complicating the study of peace-building language regimes. The processes include such programmes as security sector reform (of the armed forces and police), anticorruption campaigns, refugee return incentives, marketization of the economy where this had not taken place before or during the conflict, and some form of transitional justice; local society is expected to take an ever greater lead in these programmes as the peace-building process goes on, in readiness for an eventual end to international supervision. The institutions to be built or rebuilt will include a public service with multiple ministries, a functional judiciary with a constitutional court, a central bank, armed forces that will eventually be unified, multiple institutions comprising a free press and civil society, and a legislature that has been designed to prevent certain causes of conflict from recurring. Free and fair elections are generally held as soon as possible and are used as an early indicator of whether peace-building goals are being met. Some of these institutions may be replicated on various political levels – Bosnia-Herzegovina, for instance, was structured with a layer of ministries and elected assemblies at state level, another such layer for each of the two “entities” within the state, and a further layer inside one of those entities that was constitutionally divided into ten “cantons.” The politics of language that affect “peace-built” institutions (institutions in a society undergoing peace-building) such as these are complex. The design of the institutions and the everyday business that takes place in them will need to consider groups’ claims to language rights, bearing in mind that conflict will have reshaped the political and social relations between groups. In ethnopolitical conflict, the fixing and hardening of symbolic boundaries between a certain ethnic group and its others may often have been a tool used to legitimize the ethnopolitical violence (see Gagnon 2004; Žarkov 2007), which has implications for post-conflict language politics. The course and aftermath of an ethnopolitical conflict can affect language politics in many ways, including: (a) the addition of an official language, as in Kosovo after the defeat of Slobodan Milošević’s policy of Serbianization, where the constitution now recognizes Albanian as well as Serbian as official languages; (b) the discarding of one of several official languages, as in Rwanda, where the government has removed the official status of French as part of a broader diplomatic acrimony with France (Samuelson and Freedman 2010); (c) the effects of an ethnopolitically

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driven language separation, as in the Yugoslav successor states, where language reform in Croatia has had the goal of establishing Croatian as recognizably a separate language rather than a variant of Serbo-Croat, with knock-on effects for language politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Greenberg 2004); (d) changing perceptions of existing linguistic elements, as again in the Yugoslav successor states, where the Cyrillic script became so strongly identified with Serbian language and culture during and after the 1990s wars that non-Serbs (except Macedonians) now frequently perceive it as a symbol that excludes or even threatens them; and (e) special linguistic needs or demands in particular regions or municipalities, such as in Kosovo, where the constitution provides that the languages of recognized ethnic minorities shall have official status in municipalities where they are spoken by at least 5 per cent of the population (Doli, Cabiri, and Korenica 2010, 10). And this is only an indicative, not an exhaustive, list. Language is a key symbol of ethnic identity and of a group’s distinctiveness from other groups (Smith 1991; Jenkins 1997). Any ethnopolitical conflict, therefore, will likely have had some effect on how languages are socially understood. Moreover, the political and social transformation after such a conflict creates new opportunities for political struggles around language, in which much is to be gained for ethnonationalist politicians who are able to privilege the language of the group they represent and marginalize those of others. Vanessa Pupavac (2012, 196), for instance, argues that the framework of “language rights” in post-ethnopoliticalconflict societies defends minority ethnic groups against majorities but does nothing to break down the framework of ethnopolitics itself. Peace-building must take note of all these language politics, and operate using up-to-date rather than pre-conflict knowledge of them, in order to reshape state traditions in accordance with the desired outcomes of the liberal peace. However, language politics in peace-building situations go further yet than this: the institutions of the peace-built state interact with the agencies of intervention by using language, and these interactions therefore have their own linguistic politics. They are no exception to Alastair Pennycook’s (1994, 34) observation that “acts of language use always imply a position within a social order.” Peace-building agencies have at the very least a monitoring role, and in certain cases also have executive powers: the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina can fire elected political representatives who violate or obstruct the peace agreement (Caplan 2004), and the European

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Union Rule of Law Mission (eulex ) in Kosovo continues to have certain executive powers in the sphere of justice regarding investigations into war crimes, interethnic crime, and corruption (Brosig 2011). Monitoring the local state’s operations requires either that foreign officials have sufficient competence in the language(s) it uses or that an extensive apparatus of interpretation and translation exists. This need for effective language competence or language support is even more urgent when an intervention agency has to enforce an executive decision. The language politics in foreign/local interaction and the language politics within a peace-built society also affect each other. An example from Bosnia-Herzegovina is the demand by Bosnian Croat authorities for intervention agencies to treat Croatian as a separate language from Bosnian and Serbian, in line with the language policy of their kin state, Croatia. The intervention as a whole did not have a coordinated policy regarding the number of languages in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and several options were possible: (a) issue one version of a communication only, on the grounds that the languages were still mutually intelligible; (b) issue versions in Latin and Cyrillic script; or (c) issue versions in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian according to three separate standards. The Factions Liaison Office of the nato headquarters in Sarajevo, responsible for military liaison with what were then the three armed forces inside Bosnia-Herzegovina, agreed to the demand to produce three separate versions of every document. This had the practical advantage of avoiding the situation where a liaison partner might refuse to read or sign a document because of a language dispute. Louise Askew (2012, 112), however, warns that this decision risked “reifying the slight linguistic differences that exist between the languages.” The impression that the nato force supported this reification might in turn have contributed to “wider divisive identity politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina” and thus impeded broader peace-building objectives (Askew 2012, 108– 9). In any event, in 2001 the force switched to a policy of producing only one version of working documents for military liaison, and its translators strove to downplay monoethnic signifiers in the language they produced (Askew 2012, 116–17). A further dimension of the language politics component of peacebuilding relates to the everyday use of language by the people who implement and embody the powers of the intervention agencies. These are a mixture of foreigners living as short- or long-term visitors to the country and locally recruited project workers (mainly from the country in

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question, though some may have travelled from neighbouring countries with a shared language in order to access the employment opportunities). The foreigners within an agency are themselves likely to come from a mixture of countries or language backgrounds; though certain agencies such as national development agencies may recruit only from one country, these are an exception. English is the lingua franca that permits these multinationally constituted agencies and teams to function. However, it is a specialized English, filled with neologisms to denote concepts that have no meaning outside peace-building and are not easily translated into other languages, including those of the society being peace-built. Successfully understanding and using this English requires underlying familiarity with the work of peace-building and its institutions; general-purpose English language instruction would not produce competence in its vocabulary. As Steven Sampson (1996, 123) notes in his research into civil society projects in 1990s Albania, which had not experienced armed conflict but where similar techniques were being applied, “the world of projects has its own discourse,” in which “the ubiquity of English and of what we might call ‘project-speak’ enable communication to take place among the transnational actors.” This draws attention not only to formal linguistic practices that constitute the sphere of the intervention as an area that requires certain cultural capital to access, but also to informal practices that promote the separateness of the intervention and those who work for it. One set of informal practices is spatial, meaning that the intervention’s buildings, vehicles, and officials exist within the physical space of the peace-built country but move through it using a geography designed for the intervention’s own purposes (Higate and Henry 2009). As part of creating this parallel world, the landscape is renamed using a foreign language, typically English (Footitt and Baker 2012, 145–7). Another set of informal practices, where language also plays a role, relate to workers’ everyday practices of sociability. Expatriate employees and consultants of intervention agencies are likely to socialize predominantly with other expatriates, and particularly with those in the same sectors. In certain settings, agencies’ security policies restrict their staff to these forms of sociability even if they wish to socialize more widely, that is, more “locally.” Mark Duffield (2010, 468) has thus written of the “fortified aid compound” such risk management policies produce, which characterizes some but not all sites and stages of intervention: it is “a place of refuge and consump-

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tion” in expatriate aid workers’ lives and “is somewhere to unwind, take a shower, drink a cold beer and watch some tv .” Yet even where agencies consider risks lower and do not prevent staff from socializing or living locally, social separation between intervention workers and others is likely to occur: it creates a “comfort zone” (Fechter 2012, 1,483), a temporary relief from immersion in the foreign.³ Language is decisive in constituting this comfort zone, and can even blur the boundaries of what would be considered foreign and local on the grounds of nationality. Local as well as foreign workers for international agencies are often (but not always) able to participate in these social spaces, as long as their English competence is sufficient, and the friendships that develop in this setting may lead to opportunities for employment and mobility that a local worker might otherwise not be able to access (Heuser 2012). English as a lingua franca makes such spaces possible. A foreign mental health worker in Cambodia interviewed by Anne-Meike Fechter (2012, 1,483) thus speaks of “hanging out with people who speak my own language or English” as a form of self-care that enables him to continue working. Though the full quotation reveals that English is not his first language, socializing in English is still – significantly – part of his experience of comfort, rather than something contributing to a discomfort of being fully immersed in a social space he would class as foreign. Lingua franca English in such an account is therefore domesticated compared with the foreignness of the intervention site. The hierarchies and power relations in which these practices are embedded should lead us to consider broader critiques of peace-building and to ask what wider implications for language politics they might have. C R I T I QUE S OF P E A CE - B U I LD I N G A N D T H EI R IM PLICATIONS FOR L A NGUA GE P OLI T I CS

Critiques of peace-building operate on two main levels. On the first, critics argue that, while the intentions behind peace-building are sound, the methods used to implement it do not achieve its promised ends. Roland Paris (2004), for instance, contends that peace-building road maps ought to prioritize building stable institutions before rushing toward elections and economic liberalization. On the second, deeper level, critics argue that the intentions behind peace-building are themselves unsound (Orford

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1997; Chandler 2006). This approach is grounded in a structural critique of global power relations, which also has implications for viewing the spread and power of English in the contemporary world. In his critique of international intervention, David Chandler (2006, 48–51) observes that its practices ostensibly aim to create a strong local state and civil society through democratization and capacity-building processes, but that the emphasis on “the regulatory role of international institutions” actually obstructs the formation of a domestic political process that would be a meaningful collective expression of the society’s interests. In short, there has been a “prioritisation of governance over government” (Chandler 2006, 51). Chandler (2006, 45) interprets the Bosnian state, for instance, as a mechanism for implementing eu policy priorities within that territory, rather than as an institution with realistic power to deviate from these priorities and pursue alternatives if voters desire. Anne Orford (1997, 468) similarly argues that the political transformations that international institutions of economic liberalization require of states (and that are folded into peace-building) remove political authority from those states and their electorates: “the means chosen to achieve that end of market liberalization often infringe on the right to self-determination or democratic governance understood in substantive terms.” For both authors, the very nature of international intervention undermines the sovereignty of the peace-built states and thus of their citizens. Peace-building institutions’ detachment from the societies in which they operate has been described as an “accountability gap” (Keohane 2003, 141). The argument from the structural critique of peace-building is that its procedures institutionalize the peace-builders’ unaccountability to peace-built societies and make the accountability gap impossible to close (Visoka 2012, 190–1). The language component of peace-building as it is currently constituted exacerbates the problems these critical authors identify. Andrew Gilbert, an anthropologist who has studied the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s work in Bosnia-Herzegovina, has found that the organization’s dependence on knowledge that was in, or could be easily translated into, written English documents cast doubt on any locally derived knowledge that could not be so rendered. Within the organization, presenting information in such a form was understood as modern, rational, and compatible with the values the intervention promoted, which led to a binary perception where non-text forms were understood as the opposite

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of these. Gilbert (2008, 53) argues that this understanding of transparency, predicated on whether or not a claim could be translated into the language and conceptual vocabulary that peace-building officials understood, masked the complexity of social and linguistic interaction, since it hid “the socially-intersubjective nature of meaning, the ambiguity and ambivalence raised by practices of translation, and the fact of cultural difference, all of which … these foreigners were poorly equipped to mediate.” Evidence such as this suggests that, where an accountability gap exists, it is widened by the fact that the intervention operates in a foreign language. Considering language in the wider politics of peace-building also calls attention to the question of agency: who carries out the intervention, and who is included when the agents of intervention are conceptualized? Vivienne Jabri (2010, 41) writes of “an international civil service at large,” whose members travel from peace-built state to peace-built state: these are the foreigners whose professional and everyday uses of language, mainly English, are discussed above. But peace-building also depends on locally recruited project workers hired for their proficiency in local language(s) and in English: even if they do not have the job title of a language intermediary (e.g., “interpreter,” “translator,” “language assistant”), their work involves constant mediation between languages. Whether deliberately or not, peace-building thus creates a new socio-economic group in the societies it reshapes: what could be thought of as an “interpretariat” or “projectariat” that is both privileged and precarious, characterized by hard-currency earnings and improved access to international mobility compared to most of the local population,⁴ but also by the endemic job insecurity of shortterm project-based employment (Jansen 2006; Baker 2012, 2014). Access to these jobs will depend on educational resources that have already been formally or informally acquired, meaning that this employment reproduces as well as produces social stratification (Baker 2011b). James Scott (1998, 48, 78), in his study of the importance of standardization in the strengthening of state power, points to the everyday power of “local guide” or “local tracker” figures (including interpreters, notaries, teachers, and soldiers) in mediating interactions between the populace and a state that operates in a different language; he also points to the privilege this brings them compared to other citizens, including the capacity to profit at their own expense. In a context where translation studies has boosted the visibility of the translator and interpreter (Venuti 1995;

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M. Baker 2006), is there scope to see members of peace-building’s local projectariats as equivalent to Scott’s guides? These intermediaries can constitute an extra layer of gatekeeping or friction in peace-building activities (Jacquemet 2010), but their role does not confer the same amount of power that politicians or organized criminals are able to exercise. Making language intermediaries visible nonetheless complicates the foreign/local binary in peace-building accounts. Although it is fair to say that the language politics of peace-building mean that “a gulf is created between the new, technical versions of state institutions and the forms and language of political community that makes sense to people” (Brown et al. 2010, 107), not all local people are on the far side of that gulf. Some, indeed, operate the ferries from side to side. Further research is also needed to identify what impact interventions aim to have on languages within the state, addressing the question of what domestic language regimes, if any, make the best contribution to the goals of democratization and marketization. A case in point is Rwanda, where the state switched the language of instruction in schools to English instead of French in 2008 (Samuelson and Freedman 2010): what were the opinions and reactions of international organizations in Rwanda? If the state appears as a determining force in the sociolinguistic landscape (Blommaert 2005, 397), it is necessary to ask whether in peace-building the international agencies are also determining forces of this kind – when, in a situation where a language regime meant to ensure pluralism or minority protection was not respected, they might have the capacity to intervene in and rectify the local state’s practices. The position of peace-building agencies with respect to minority language rights and conflict prevention is important, but is not the only dimension of their influence in language politics: global English has a politics of its own, which is important in the language politics of peace-building even when it is not a first language for any of the local population. In the contemporary world, the discourse of English as an international language “has moved from a rhetoric of colonial expansion, through a rhetoric of development aid to a rhetoric of the international free market” (Pennycook 1994, 6). The promotion of English is intended to have certain effects that are in line with the wider goals of peace-building. Language ideologies surrounding English, as well as those surrounding any languages of regional importance in a particular case, thus also need to be taken into account.

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C ON C LUS I ON : L A N G U A G ES, P O W ER , A N D A POST-LIBE RAL PE ACE

Like peace-building, the role of English in the world is also subject to critique. Robert Phillipson (1992, 2), for instance, called on linguists in the early 1990s to “relate the global role of English, and the way in which language pedagogy supports the spread and promotion of the language, to the political, economic, military, and cultural pressures that propel it forward.” One example is the work of international philanthropic foundations. Examining the discourse of the Open Society Institute (osi ), which has funded many English language training projects in societies undergoing peace-building, Amy Jo Minett (2009, 27) finds it driven by a “belief that the whole project of ‘forging open societies’ is dependent upon those societies’ abilities to communicate internationally and successfully, that is, to communicate in English.” Yet new or reinterpreted discourses around English emerge at each stage of the osi ’s implementation of power. Most strikingly, while top-level osi discourse identifies those who are “young, professional, and working for the future” as the targets and desired subjects of English language training, local osi -funded projects do more to promote access to English for disadvantaged groups, including “generations brought up under communism” who are invisible in the top-level osi discourse (Minett 2009, 206). Other examples of locally rescripting this discourse include an osi English language training programme in a Russian city, which constructs English as “the language vital for economic success” rather than for sociocultural transformation, and a Tajikistan branch that injects “taking into account local social-historical differences” into an explanation of the “open society” (Minett 2009, 239–40, 244–6). While discursive reproduction can still be observed, there is evidence that discursive resistance, nuance, and reappropriation also exist. The cases I have discussed in this chapter suggest that any “praxis of post-liberal peace-building” (Richmond 2010, 32) will need to consider the language component of peace-building to a greater extent than has traditionally been the case. If this praxis must be “predicated upon an intimate understanding of everyday life in each context” (Richmond 2010, 32), something that Oliver Richmond argues has been absent from the universalized peace-building model, than it must surely also be more sensitive to the local language and to the knowledge expressed in it. Calls in the peace-building literature for a “hybrid form of peace” (MacGinty 2011),

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which is produced not only through incentives and coercions from liberal peace agencies but also through local actors’ resistance to, adaptation of, and alternatives to them, could be usefully combined with the “microsocial” approach to power in A. Suresh Canagarajah’s (1999, 209, 211) work on the politics of language teaching, which seeks to bridge the concepts of “linguistic imperialism” and “linguistic hybridity.” In policy terms, reversing the short-termism of peace-building careers, so that foreign staff could have long-term engagement with a particular society and could be expected to develop much greater local language competence, would help to facilitate a peace-building model that could better take local languages and knowledge into account. Could language awareness be injected even further into peace- and state-building? One might ask how an intervention would look, and whether it would help to individuate the universal model of peace, if its working language was, to the extent possible, one or more local languages rather than English. The choice of which language(s) to privilege in this way would still be political and would still have significant effects, as evidence from Bosnia-Herzegovina suggests (Askew 2012). The problem of project-speak would not itself be alleviated if a local-working-language policy consisted entirely of translating these universalizing terms from English into local languages. Friction would remain in the translation process, especially if translation work were improvised rather than professionalized. Dependence on local language intermediaries during the first one to two years of the intervention (while the first tranche of foreign staff were learning the language to a sufficient standard) would be high, although it is already. In practice, even though it is not impossible to imagine, such a languageregime change reversing the power of English in global governance is unlikely to take place. There should still be more critical consideration, in organizing an intervention, of the languages in which activities take place, and greater commitment to language learning and use by foreign staff; this must go along with greater awareness of local language politics and of the impact that apparent foreign endorsement or opposition of particular standpoints is likely to have on them. Consideration of language policies within peace-built states should also be part of determining the desired outcomes of peace- and state-building projects. Further research on these issues is necessary in order to incorporate peace-building organizations into political scientists’ understanding of the relationships between lan-

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guages and states, and to develop a peace-building praxis that will be more grounded in, and accountable to, the people who are supposed to benefit from it.

NOTES

1 The inspiration for this chapter originated in research carried out for the Languages at War project and funded by the uk Arts and Humanities Research Council. Although the focus of the research was military peace operations rather than civilian peace-building, I am extremely grateful to Louise Askew, Hilary Footitt, Michael Kelly, and Simona Tobia, and to the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Southampton, for conversations that prompted me to begin reflecting on these issues. 2 A senior nato linguist interviewed for Languages at War considered that the only situation in which a nato mission would use a working language other than English might be a French-led deployment to a francophone country (Kelly and Baker 2013, 166). 3 On the leisure practices of military travellers, see Baker (2011a). 4 This mobility includes the ability to become part of Jabri’s “international civil service at large” by joining the foreign workforce of peace-building in another country. An example is the career of Darko Močibob, a medical doctor who became an interpreter for unprofor during the siege of Sarajevo and became the regular interpreter to the unprofor commander General Rose. He joined the United Nations Iraq Programme in 1997 and has worked for the un with a focus on Iraq ever since (United Nations 2012).

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Askew, Louise. 2012. “Language Policy and Peace-Building.” In Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict, edited by Hilary Footitt and Michael Kelly, 106–20. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Baker, Catherine. 2011a. “Have You Ever Been in Bosnia? British Military Travelers in the Balkans since 1992.” Journeys 12 (1): 63–92. – 2011b. “Tito’s Children? Language Learning, Educational Resources, and Cultural Capital in the Life Histories of Interpreters Working in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Südosteuropa 59 (4): 477–501. – 2012. “Prosperity without Security: The Precarity of Interpreters in Postsocialist, Postconflict Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Slavic Review 71 (4): 849–72. – 2014. “The Local Workforce of International Intervention in the Yugoslav Successor States: ‘Precariat’ or ‘Projectariat’? Towards an Agenda for Future Research.” International Peacekeeping 21 (1): 91–106.

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Baker, Mona. 2006. Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. London: Routledge. Blommaert, Jan. 2005. “Situating Language Rights: English and Swahili in Tanzania Revisited.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 9 (3): 390–417. Brosig, Malte. 2011. “The Interplay of International Institutions in Kosovo: Between Convergence, Confusion and Niche Capabilities.” European Security 20 (2): 185–204. Brown, M. Anne, Volker Boege, Kevin P. Clements, and Anna Nolan. 2010. “Challenging Statebuilding as Peacebuilding: Working with Hybrid Political Orders to Bring Peace.” In Peacebuilding: Critical Developments and Approaches, edited by Oliver P. Richmond, 99–115. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Canagarajah, A. Suresh. 1999. “On efl Teachers, Awareness and Agency.” elt Journal 53 (3): 207–14. Caplan, Richard. 2004. “International Authority and State Building: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Global Governance 10 (1): 53–65. Chandler, David. 2006. Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-Building. London: Pluto. Doli, Dren, Ketrina Cabiri, and Fisnik Korenica. 2010. “Equalizing the Use of Language: A View to Kosovo Law’s Guarantees upon Minority Languages.” Open Law Journal 3: 6–14. Duffield, Mark. 2010. “Risk-Management and the Fortified Aid Compound: Everyday Life in Post-Interventionary Society.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 4 (4): 453–74. Fechter, Anne-Meike. 2012. “‘Living Well’ while ‘Doing Good’? (Missing) Debates on Altruism and Professionalism in Aid Work.” Third World Quarterly 33 (8): 1,475–91. Footitt, Hilary, and Catherine Baker. 2012. “Fraternization.” In Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict, edited by Hilary Footitt and Michael Kelly, 139–62. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Footitt, Hilary, and Michael Kelly, eds. 2012. Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gagnon, V.P., Jr. 2004. The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gilbert, Andrew. 2008. “Transparency, Modernity and International Authority.” In “Foreign Authority and the Politics of Impartiality in Postwar BosniaHerzegovina,” chapter 6. p hd diss., University of Chicago. Greenberg, Robert D. 2004. Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and its Disintegration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hare, Peter, and Nicholas Fletcher. 2012. “Resolving Conflict via English: The British Council’s Peacekeeping English Project.” In Languages and the Military: Alliances, Occupation and Peace Building, edited by Hilary Footitt and Michael Kelly, 202–16. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Heuser, Eric Anton. 2012. “Befriending the Field: Culture and Friendships in Development Worlds.” Third World Quarterly 33 (8): 1,423–37. Higate, Paul, and Marsha Henry. 2009. Insecure Spaces: Peacekeeping, Power and Performance in Haiti, Kosovo and Liberia. London: Zed. Jabri, Vivienne. 2010. “War, Government, Politics: A Critical Response to the Hegemony of the Liberal Peace.” In Peacebuilding: Critical Developments and Approaches, edited by Oliver P. Richmond, 41–57. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jacquemet, Marco. 2010. “The Registration Interview: Restricting Refugees’ Narrative Performance.” In Critical Readings in Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 133–51. London: Routledge. Jansen, Stef. 2006. “The Privatisation of Home and Hope: Return, Reforms and the Foreign Intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Dialectical Anthropology 30: 177–99. Jenkins, Richard. 1997. Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and Explorations. London: Sage. Kelly, Michael, and Catherine Baker. 2013. Interpreting the Peace: Peace Operations, Conflict and Language in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Keohane, Robert. 2003. “Global Governance and Democratic Accountability.” In Taming Globalization: Frontiers of Governance, edited by David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, 130–59. Cambridge: Polity. MacGinty, Roger. 2011. International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Minett, Amy Jo. 2009. “Reproduction, Resistance, and Supranational Language Management: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Role of Soros-Funded English Language Programs in the Building of Open Societies.” p hd diss., Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Orford, Anne. 1997. “Locating the International: Military and Monetary Interventions after the Cold War.” Harvard International Law Journal 38 (2): 443–86. Paris, Roland. 2004. At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pennycook, Alastair. 1994. The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. Harlow: Longman. Pupavac, Vanessa. 2012. Language Rights: From Free Speech to Linguistic Governance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Razack, Sherene H. 2004. Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Richmond, Oliver P. 2010. “A Genealogy of Peace and Conflict Theory.” In Peacebuilding: Critical Developments and Approaches, edited by Oliver P. Richmond, 14–38. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sampson, Steven. 1996. “The Social Life of Projects: Importing Civil Society to Albania.” In Civil Society: Challenging Western Models, edited by Chris Hann and Elizabeth Dunn, 121–42. London: Routledge.

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Samuelson, Beth Lewis, and Sarah Warshauer Freedman. 2010. “Language Policy, Multilingual Education, and Power in Rwanda.” Language Policy 9: 191–215. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, ct : Yale University Press. Smith, Anthony D. 1991. National Identity. London: Penguin. United Nations. “United Nations Visitors Centre.” Accessed 15 October 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20140111184405/http://visit.un.org/wcm/content/ site/visitors/lang/en/home/to_see_and_do/lectures/alpha_list_m. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge. Vieira de Mello, Sergio. 2001. “The Evolution of un Humanitarian Operations.” In Aspects of Peacekeeping, edited by D.S. Gordon and F.H. Toase, 115–24. London: Frank Cass. Visoka, Gezim. 2012. “The ‘Kafkaesque Accountability’ of International Governance in Kosovo.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 6 (2): 189–212. Žarkov, Dubravka. 2007. The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia. Durham, nc : Duke University Press.

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Postscr ipt

Reflections on States and the Uses of Language Policy WILLIAM SAFRAN

States have had a variety of positions on language. Most have related to countries inhabited by more than one significant language community. A state has a large menu of policy choices at its disposal that can range from systematic and far-reaching involvement to indifference – specifically, from selecting a single uniform language, imposing it on all citizens and institutions at all levels, and banning the use of other languages, to leaving language matters entirely to the market. But these are ideal-typical polarities; an all-embracing language policy can be applied fully only in the public arena and in totalitarian states. In any case, most states have not had a free choice of languages. This has been true of most European states, which leaned heavily on local practice, especially during the nineteenth century. Conversely, the state has never been entirely absent from matters of language, if only because the state language regime cannot be dissociated from the imperatives of nation-building and political unity. The closest we get is when the state plays a more modest role, usually by delegating language policy to subnational authorities or to civil society. Yet political science, the discipline concerned with the state, ignored language for many years; it was too busy dealing in succession with constitutions, institutions, structural-functional decision-making processes, and, finally, the content of policy outputs. For its part, output analysis focused largely on economic payoffs rather than more intangible matters such as language. Even in studies of immigration in the United States, language was not an issue, given the American commitment to the melting pot and immigrants’ relatively quick adjustment to it.¹ This was true of

France as well, with its belief in the efficacy of the national cultural assimilation machinery. Beginning in the 1960s, the struggle for former colonies’ independence in Africa and Asia focused political scientists’ attention on ethnic diversity and conflict, and they noticed that language was becoming a matter of state interest insofar as it affected rule consolidation and nation-building. Today, language plays a role in the various subfields of political science, especially in comparative and international politics. The present volume takes an important step in getting political science in touch with language as a matter of state policy, and constitutes a major effort at “bringing the state back in.” To be sure, the state was never taken out in France or (since unification) in Italy or Germany. In many former colonies in Africa, the state was brought in for the first time, and with it, a language regime was set up for building a “state nation.” In the United States, conversely, the state, since it was “taken out” (at least as a meaningful unit of analysis by political scientists toward the end of the nineteenth century), has never been fully brought back in; and to the extent that it has, the state has meant different things.² The US-European distinction applies especially to language. In the above-named European countries, culture has been a prominent concern of public policy, including the promotion of a uniform national language. In the United States, as Selma K. Sonntag (this volume) shows, that concern has been left largely to subnational governments, civil society, and the market. Similarly, the US government has not promoted an international language regime, although American global power has created the conditions for it. The contributors in this volume explore a large number of language regimes, among them two classic opposites: France as the most interventionist, and the United States as the least. But the difference is not absolute: French state policies are tempered by the street and the market and, as Sonntag (this volume) demonstrates, the US federal government’s laissez-faire approach is moderated by the policies of individual states and the exigencies of global competition. The language regimes examined here represent a diversity of social conditions, political structures, and multilingual realities. Decision-makers choose policies in terms of these realities and in terms of their likely consequences. It seems clear that state language policy is made with some notion of impacting society and furthering the larger aims of the state, among them the following: unifying diverse segments of a nation, spreading literacy, enhancing productivity (Gellner 1983, 11), advancing capitalism

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(Anderson 1983), establishing a normative grammar, and, in the Gramscian view, fortifying political hegemony (Ives this volume). A language regime also reflects the type of polity. Unitary states are predisposed toward unilingualism, while federal structures, which distribute powers territorially, lend themselves more easily to multilingual arrangements. But, as Turgeon and Gagnon (this volume) point out, federal countries have a variety of representational formulas. Moreover, federalism comes in diverse forms: German federalism, with language playing a minor role; the federalisms of Switzerland, Canada, India, and former Yugoslavia, each with several constitutive language communities; and Soviet federalism, in which regional languages occupied a more narrowly defined place and Russian was the unchallenged transrepublic medium. All the case studies in this volume deal with formally democratic countries, in which elections and coalition-building play a role and influence the choice of language policy. However, democratic systems are not necessarily more conducive to language pluralism than autocratic ones: in the former Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires there was more de facto language pluralism than in the Third French Republic. The causal relationships among languages, states, and nations are varied and complex. Language has played an important role in the creation of many independent states, but not always of national collective identities, and not necessarily at the same time. The creation of Italians (as distinct from Piedmontese), Germans (distinct from Prussians or Saxons), and Israelis (distinct from Jews) began after the formation of their respective states, and cannot be attributed exclusively to language. More than a century after Canada attained independent Dominion status, many still question whether Canadians are a nation. The creation of Americans has been an ongoing process not clearly related to language. Existing traditions and realities may also affect the choice of lingua franca. Amy H. Liu (this volume) lists three types of this sort: colonial, religious, and commercial; the first is chosen in ex-colonies that have too many internal linguistic divisions and where no single domestic idiom is dominant; the second is anachronistic in an increasingly secularized world; and the third often complements an established indigenous language. As Liu explains, political coalitions determine whether a state adopts a power-sharing multilingual regime or a power-neutralizing lingua franca. The three types of lingua francas Liu mentions are spoken by many but are the mother tongues of few. To these one may add scientific and

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technical languages, which are the mother tongues of no one; they are confined to transnational elites and are not used on a daily basis. Although such languages hardly ever figure prominently in national language regimes, they may be used as a tool of national policy. Finally there is la Francophonie, a community of countries in which French is an official language or is spoken by a significant number of people: unlike global English, it is actively promoted, is used as a tool of diplomacy and a means of global cultural assertion, and serves as a substitute for old-fashioned territorial imperialism. PA R A DI GMS : B E AT EN PAT H S, I N ST I T U T I O N S, AND REGIM E CHOICE S

Language regimes do not emerge ex nihilo and do not exist in a vacuum. They reflect existing institutional arrangements and policy trajectories. Many state language policies have been influenced by traditions and institutional constraints that have been elements of the polity. Most institutions have a past; and most political traditions are embodied and reified in institutions or refer to them in one way or another. These realities constitute the theoretical underpinning of both the volume as a whole and also the individual case studies. But paradigms may be applied too rigidly. As the editors of this volume warn us in the introduction, “State traditions guide the path dependency of language policy choices … However, they do not predetermine language policy choices.” These choices are influenced, inter alia, by the number of speakers of various languages and the insistence with which they assert language claims; the “thickness” of a culture with which a language is associated; the preferences of a country’s dominant ethnic group, and, on occasion, external pressures. They are path-dependent unless and until a change in policy alters the path. Such changes can come about as a consequence of revolutions, boundary changes, demographic shifts, and unforeseen events. These include sudden changes of regimes and decision-making modes – for example the collapse of the Soviet Union, which abolished the monopoly of Russian; the expulsion of Singapore from Malaya (see Liu this volume), which weakened the position of the Chinese population and strengthened the place of the Malay language; federalization in Belgium, which furthered language equality; French decentralization, which was accompanied by the legitimation and selective support of minority languages (Garcia this volume); and the growth of electoral

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power of immigrant ethnics in various European countries, which has led to the demand to recognize their languages and, in some cases, threatened the monopoly of the dominant language. Language regimes have been changed abruptly by decisions of political leaders who “push” a particular language policy. This includes the decision by Kemal Atatürk to adopt the Latin alphabet; by Lenin to legitimize the languages of the various sister republics of the Soviet Union (however limited the practical meaning of their official character); by Stalin to end institutional support of Yiddish; by the Franco regime to suppress the non-Castilian languages of Spain; by Sukarno to adopt Bahasa Indonesia (a form of Malay) rather than Dutch or English or the more widely spoken Javanese as the national language, and Trudeau’s promotion of the Official Languages Act of 1969 (see Gaspard this volume). These decisions have been made for a variety of reasons. For example, the Syrians embraced a policy of Arabization of the educational system in large part because of resentment of the French for having divided Syria; and Algerian governments have so far refused to join la Francophonie, despite the fact that the use of French there is more widespread than in any other former colony. Conversely, in Morocco, the Berbers, who constitute the majority of the population, consider the Arabs, not the French, as the cultural colonizers who tried to stamp out Tamazight, and regard French as a more neutral language, especially in the fight against Islamization (Nadeau and Barlow 2006, 310). A language regime may also be adopted in response to international pressures, such as the minorities treaties imposed on successor states after World War i to protect minority languages (Dugdale and Bewes 1926). Language regimes are based on traditions, social constructs, and the political decisions that become accepted norms. These norms are embodied in institutions regulating, legitimating, disseminating, or inferiorizing one or more languages. Indeed, language may itself be regarded as an institution. To the extent that institution(alism) refers to anything that has been put in place, this applies in particular to the French language. As one book on the history of the French language puts it: The French see their language … as a fixed and immovable part of the state apparatus. This view goes to the heart of one of the most fundamental cultural differences between English speakers and the French. The British tend to understate their institutions; their constitution is unwritten and their legal system is not codified into a

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whole … [T]heir attitude towards language reflects this. The English language has rules (and many exceptions), but English speakers downplay the rules … The French … proclaim and embrace their institutions with all their officialdom – and their language with all its rules. (Nadeau and Barlow 2006, 141–2) In short, “French became an institution (was institué), and primary schoolteachers became known as instituteurs” (Nadeau and Barlow 2006, 142). This happened toward the end of the nineteenth century in France, which enforced the use of a single language by instituting a national school system. This happened several centuries after the formation of the French nation. During the past generation, while the linguistic norms the Académie Française established continued to be adhered to, France became more open to cultural pluralism and more accepting of the spontaneous language of the street and the market. In the end, the popular language was incorporated into the language regime. This conforms to the view of the editors of this volume, who do not draw a rigid line between state policies and the behaviour of language users. The reason is, as Ives (this volume) puts it, that “spontaneous speech acts or local language practices cannot be so easily separated from language structures or standardized languages.” If recurrent and predictable, practices become institutionalized and part of the regime. The “new” institutionalists define institutions (somewhat tautologically) as “recurring patterns … conditioning the behaviour of members within the institutions, shaping and projecting values in the social system in terms of attitudes” (Robins 1976, 7). Have they constructed too capacious a conceptual umbrella? Should anything be excluded? Is civil society (as distinct from the state) part of the language regime? Conversely, are official language policies that are not enforced, or not enforcible, still components of the state language regime?³ Developments in the global environment and the position of a country within it may inflect its language policies. For example, Mandarin enjoys official dominance over Taiwanese in Taiwan (Dupré this volume), although the latter is more widely spoken and English is more globally useful. The choice of English as an official language and/or lingua franca in many states in Africa and Asia is a contested topic.⁴ Lingua francas can be democratizing tools, but only if accompanied by universal compulsory education.

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P OLI CY OPT I ON S

Policy choices are made for a reason. Whether they are rational is not always clear. Rationality is in the eyes of the policy-makers; their motivations, and those of the states they represent, vary according to traditions, demographic mixtures, and power relationships, as many of the contributors in this volume demonstrate. State policies are not self-implementing; they require the cooperation of educational elites, the civil service, and the economic sector. The state may lack the requisite financial means; the policies may provoke too much resistance on the part of the majority, or they may produce unanticipated and undesirable consequences, such as ghettoization, deformations of the national culture, political disorientation, or a decline in political loyalty. A language policy based on a state’s affirmation of language rights is not enough (see Cardinal this volume); even the official permission to use a minority language is meaningless without institutional support – which must extend to the support of a community using that language (see Sarangi this volume). Such support is not always automatic. For example, French elites often frown on the habitual use of a minority language as a manifestation of communautarisme, a close ascriptive identification with an ethnic community. In short, the individual right to a language cannot be divorced from the collective right of a language group. There are no collective rights in the United States or France, however. There are no language rights because there are no group rights in either country, and accommodations for speakers of minority languages are local and often informal, as the two chapters on France and the United States affirm. Harguindégay and Itçaina (this volume) point out that in the Basque country in France, political coalitions have existed, able to influence language choices in favour of minority language rights. Yet despite significant decentralization policies since the 1980s, these rights are more declaratory than real, and regional minority coalitions have limited power, especially when it comes to language policies, which are essentially national. The public use of Basque is limited; Ikastolas are private, although they may be under contract with the state. For many Basques, what has been important is “the right of expression” – to use their language on street signs, in official dealings, in broadcasts, and to have it taught in public

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schools – rather than the full daily use of it on par with French, and above all, to have its legitimacy acknowledged. In 2008, a constitutional amendment recognized Basque, together with other ethnoregional languages, as part of France’s heritage. Still, the Council of Europe’s Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of 1992 signed by the French government in 1999 has not been ratified. Cross-border collaboration, petitions, and mobilization on the ground may add up to little, for reasons Nuria Garcia (this volume) discusses. Thus, a number of languages are electives for baccalauréat examinations, but these are mostly European national languages rather than the regional languages of the Hexagon. To return to the United States: as Sonntag shows, official federal policy has been neither to promote or to constrain any language, nor to establish norms; in fact, it may perhaps not add up to a language regime as such. Federal laws have been enacted to promote teaching foreign languages largely in the interest of defence and trade, rather than linguistic diversity; and to permit the use of minority languages, not in order to secure their future for their own sake but to protect the civil rights of their (largely immigrant) speakers, including the right to vote and receive public primary education. In addition, there is selective accommodation for speakers of foreign languages, in the form of foreign-language census forms, election information, and the provision of interpreters in dealing with courts and other official bodies. Most of this accommodation takes place on state and local levels. Some states, among them Oregon (which Sonntag discusses in some detail), go somewhat beyond the federal approach in language training – not in order to form a cadre of polyglots, but to further the knowledge of languages as part of general culture. The only formal language rights relating to multilingualism (not mentioned by Sonntag) relate to New Mexico and Hawaii, which are officially bilingual because of their non-English-speaking native populations. The absence of a national US language regime in terms of a coherent and consistent set of rules and regulations is attributed not only to the ideology of the marketplace, but also the fact that the dominance of English has not been seriously challenged externally or internally. One reason Sonntag cites is the relative absence of historical national minorities. This ignores the Native Americans, who for many generations were not regarded as fully belonging to the national political community, the Hispanics who had settled in North America before the arrival of Yankees, and the Hawaiians.

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For generations, the teaching of their languages was actively discouraged and (in the case of Hawaiian) officially banned. In recent years, however, federal authorities have selectively recognized these languages in the form of laws (such as the Native American Languages Acts of 1990 and 2006), which focus on courses and teaching materials. These acts will not give the languages in question a meaning place in a multilingual America; rather, they are “reclamation” projects mainly of interest to philologists and cultural anthropologists. Multiculturalism has been increasingly accepted in the United States as an element of pluralism and identity politics. At the same time, there is a growing fear of multilingualism analogous to France’s fear of the spread of franglais – specifically, that Spanish may eclipse English and destroy habitual conceptions of American identity and, with it, American political unity. This fear, which may be a reflection of racist attitudes, has not prevented the increasing acceptance of Spanish as a language of current use on local levels. It is an open question whether the Hispanic population’s continued growth will lead to a formal regime change toward multilingualism on the federal level. T HE P OLI T I C S O F SYMB O LI SM

In some countries, policies regarding minority languages have limited practical meaning. Some of the languages enjoying official recognition – Aymara, Corsican, Frisian, Gaelic, Provençal, and Romansch – are not spoken by many and are not expected to be widely used. Their status relates less to use as a medium than to their maintenance as ethnosymbols (Smith 2009, 32). This applies especially to ethnic diasporas, whose languages are regularly spoken in the homeland but not in the hostland. Thus the grant of official status of Danish and Sorbian in Germany is not so much an instrumental as an expressive, or symbolic, policy. Under criteria formulated under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1997), Sweden accorded formal recognition to five European minority languages. These included two Finnish languages, Romani, Sami, and Yiddish, which could be used in courts and nursing homes, and receive government funding for cultural projects. But there has been lack of enforcement; in many workplaces, speaking Finnish is forbidden; and the use of Yiddish (which had fewer than 4,000 speakers) is dangerous

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in places with growing, government-tolerated anti-Semitism (Schaechter 2006). In Holland and Moldova, Yiddish is also an official language, with a minuscule number of speakers that is steadily shrinking. Another case in point is the policy on minority languages in Poland, discussed by Roman Szul in this volume. The recognition of Kashubian as a regional language does not seem to have much effect, given the small number of speakers, except, perhaps, to show that Poland is committed to embracing multiculturalism.⁵ Garcia (this volume) notes that, in France, although eight regional languages have achieved official status as elective subjects in public schools, none of them can be chosen as a first foreign language. Symbolic policies may be enough to defuse ethnic minority dissatisfactions and prevent unrest. Conversely, they may generate resentment and unforeseen consequences; they may have a domino effect – for example, the demand for recognition of the language rights of neglected ethnies (such as members of First Nations in Quebec or Siberian tribes in Russia); or they may escalate to demands for autonomy and, in extremis, to separatist sentiments. Alternatively, they may lead to requests for more substantive language support. This last outcome would be the least threatening in the eyes of decision-makers, given the difficulty of ethnic minority individuals upholding, let alone learning, their language in face of the overwhelming weight of the majority language. Few parents in France enroll their children in calendretas, diwans, or ikastolas, and few Corsicans opt for classes at the Corsican University in Corte. Few if any Poles opt for education in Kashubian instead of Polish (see Szul this volume). In short, ethnic minorities often adopt the majority language because it is easier to do so than to fight for their own language (see Sonntag and Cardinal’s introduction in this volume for a similar argument in terms of empowerment and disempowerment). Social pressures, obstacles, and inconveniences may give them little choice. Moreover, in many cases it is a false choice, because schools teaching in minority languages tend to be inferior (see Harguindéguy and Itçaina this volume). In Baku, schools using the Azeri language rather than Russian as language of instruction cater to less ambitious pupils; in Lithuania, instruction in Polish-language schools was often so poor that parents sent their children to Lithuanianor Russian-language schools, in order to secure their admission to Lithuanian- or Russian-language universities (Gordon 1996, 229). As a result, although the provision is associated with costs for the authorities, they may not actually have to meet it.

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S TAT US A N X I E T Y

Language policy is also a reflection of a society’s political culture and intellectual discourse. The American intelligentsia’s lack of concern with language is due to the global dominance of English and the absence of language-based (or other) irredentism. The United States has neither a ministry of culture nor an agency that sets official national language standards. This indifference also explains the neglect of language by political scientists, as Sonntag and Cardinal point out in the introduction to this volume. Research in the social sciences is conducted largely in English; this is especially true of modern political science, which is an Americandominated discipline. Furthermore, American political scientists have been less concerned with verbal language altogether since their growing dependence on quantitative data sets. Official language policy may be an expression of national, regional, or global status anxiety (Safran and Liu 2012, 277). A good example is France, the position of whose national language as a lingua franca was eclipsed by English after World War ii . This development has put France into a linguistic defensive mode. There is a widespread resistance to multiculturalism and multilingualism, reflected in France’s refusal to ratify the European Charter on Regional or Minority Languages. More specifically, there is an obsession about American cultural imperialism and the “pollution” of the French language. This attitude may be attributed to cultural insecurity, a sentiment fed, inter alia, by the dominance of English as a working language in global and regional organizations. These anglophone challenges have increased appeals for government intervention. One government response was the Toubon Law of 1994 (Safran 1999; Garcia this volume), which sought to “purify” the French language by eliminating Anglicisms; another has been a policy that aims to restrict the quantity of films and other cultural products in foreign languages that may be imported. Furthermore, there is a persistent effort to safeguard the place of the French language in international and European Union organs, sometimes by the refusal of French representatives to address these organs in languages other than French. A more recent manifestation of France’s cultural insecurity was a government bill to allow universities to offer selected courses taught in English, thus upsetting a ban, introduced by the Toubon law, against using a language other than French as a medium of instruction. The new bill

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would serve two policy goals: to attract promising foreign students and to raise France’s global profile in science. But some politicians and academics denounced the bill variously as cultural suicide, a death warrant for the French language, and a humiliation of French speakers (Piquemal 2013). Representatives of Germany in regional and global organizations may have similar concerns about purity and status; and recently a cabinet minister proposed the elimination of Anglicisms from the German language, but in vain. The country’s record during World War ii has shorn off its cultural armour, so that its political and academic authorities have neither prevented English words from infiltrating, nor secured the position of German as the official language of the country, nor succeeded in gaining for German equal status with French as a working language in the European Union (Economist 2010). IM P E DI ME NTS AN D CO N ST R A I N TS

Languages are often treated unequally even where they are formally equal. The provision of adequate facilities of instruction in the mother tongue of children who belong to every linguistic minority group may be beyond the available resources of every local authority. Obviously there must be a limit: in countries where many languages are spoken, such as India and the Republic of Congo, it would be unfeasible to accommodate every language equally without distinction regarding the number of speakers, the territorial spread of the language, its rootedness, its development, and the likely impact of accommodation on national political unity. The authorities can encourage bilingualism in the bureaucracy, for example in Belgium and Canada (see Turgeon and Gagnon this volume). They can even make it mandatory in certain cases, but they cannot enforce it. Authorities cannot compel anglophone Canadians to be as fully bilingual as francophones, or Walloons as fully bilingual as Flemings. State language policy can be modified or neutralized by elements within the bureaucracy, the courts, and civil society. For example, the application of the Toubon law was limited not only by decision of the Constitutional Council, but also by the business community. Efforts by language academies to promote refined versions of the national language are challenged by ordinary citizens as well. This is particularly true of democratic societies. In France, the Jacobin tradition of unilingualism is also challenged by pressures from immigrants and ethnoregional minorities (see Garcia this

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volume; Harguindéguy and Itçaina this volume). Resistance to official language policy from below is found even in non-democratic regimes: thus, efforts to “communize” the languages of Soviet satellites in Central Europe were only partly successful, as bourgeois speech patterns persisted. In his discussion of Ireland, John Walsh (this volume) illustrates the limited effect of official language policy, at least in democratic states, which cannot force people to speak a certain language. Only a minority of Irish can speak Irish Gaelic, and only a minority of speakers do so regularly. It is the “national” language of the country and the first of two official languages. It is a compulsory subject in primary education and competence in it is required for civil service positions. This expressive element of the language regime, however, is not accompanied by a sufficiently functional element. Institutionalization has helped only to a limited degree; it has been hampered by inadequate implementation and monitoring of actual language use and an insufficient number of schools where Irish is the language of instruction. The fate of Irish, a language once strongly associated with Catholicism, exemplifies the triumph of ideology – specifically, the ideology of the market – over religion. The revival of Gaelic has encountered many impediments: Britain has been too close geographically; the Irish elite has been English-speaking; and Gaelic has been too closely identified with social conservatism. Furthermore, Gaelic did not have the same integrative function in Ireland as Hebrew has in Israel (Safran 2005). Although cultural nationalists and anti-imperialists favoured Gaelic, as Walsh notes, it was not buttressed by popular use. Finally, and perhaps most important, Irish language nationalism has been impeded by globalization, European integration, and immigration, all of which have fortified the position of English in an increasingly monolingual country. It is unclear what the impact of this development on Irish culture is. The question is whether a language is merely a cultural tool, whether the weakening of an ethnic language is accompanied by a weakening of ethnic culture and collective identity, or whether these persist independently of a particular language. L A NGUA GE R EG I MES A N D T H E W O R LD AT L ARGE

Language regimes do not exist in global isolation. Public policies have in many instances been influenced by imperial ambitions, pressures from international organizations and powerful countries, security considera-

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tions, and global economic competition. Since the beginning of modern colonial expansion, missionaries alphabetized local languages and taught the language of the imperial overlord to spread Christianity and, in so doing, strengthened imperial control. In this effort, they were assisted by trading companies supported by national governments. In their possessions in Asia, British and Dutch officials encouraged multilingualism as part of “plural society” – not for the sake of cultural diversity or tolerance, but to maintain colonial rule by means of divide et impera (see Furnivall 1939; 1948). Language has been a means not only of nation-building and the “ethnonation-destruction” of numerically smaller peoples (Connor 1972), but also of empire disaggregation. The desire to safeguard the languages of ethnic communities was not the proximate cause of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, but it was a major raison d’être of the Balkan successor states. As Catherine Baker (this volume) shows, language plays a role in peacebuilding: most third-party facilitators speak English or another lingua franca, and they assume that the representatives of the contending ethnonational communities are familiar with that language. English clearly dominates. This is not an explicit or overt language policy; rather, it attests to the role of English, as, faute de mieux, the most widely understood and the most neutral existing transnational language, at least in most of today’s global and regional conflicts. This does not, and should not, predispose peace-building personnel to disrespect all contending parties’ languages and cultures: ideally, there should be a policy on the part of mediating third-party states that their peace-facilitating personnel be familiar with the languages of the countries, regions, or ethnic communities in question. In practice, however, these facilitators come mostly from countries in which the national language is a lingua franca and are not familiar with the languages of the contending ethnonational communities, and this knowledge gap tends to work to their disadvantage. It is interesting to note that neither the United Nations nor any of the Western powers have shown much interest in mediating the conflict between China and the Tibetans, Turkey and the Kurds, or Russia and the Chechen, each essentially a conflict that pits the interest of a large state in protecting its territorial integrity against that of a small ethnonation in protecting its language and culture.

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NOTES

1 The study by Glazer and Moynihan (1970), which focuses on the persistence of ethnic identity, does not dwell on language. 2 Inter alia, the “state” has meant effective decision-making, the primacy of the public interest (manifested in the production of public products), the dominant place of the executive, and winning contests with the private sector (see Evans et al. 1985). Defined in these senses, the state has, in fact, been “taken back out” during recent Republican presidencies. As Sonntag and Cardinal confirm in their introduction to this volume, the state has only a “relative degree of autonomy,” and thus tends to be perceived as merely another interest group. 3 See Migdal (1997, 218), who considers new or historical institutionalism an analytic potpourri, “absorbing elements [from] structuralist, culturalist, and rational-choice perspectives.” 4 Ives (this volume) rightly points out that most discussions of globalization have ignored language, including English as a global language. However, the regular use of the English language by a non-English-speaking country, especially if it is formalized, is a component of its particular language regime. Whether English is truly “global” depends on which countries are, in the words of Ives, “norm-providing” and which are “norm-dependent,” and – one may add – if the language is perceived as ethnically and culturally neutral. 5 In the 2002 census, only 51,000 listed Kashubian as their native language; in the 2012 census, only 16,000 declared Kashubian as their sole ethnic identity.

REFERENCES

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Connor, Walker. 1972. “Nation-Building or Nation-Destroying?” World Politics 24 (April): 319–55. Dugdale, Blanche E.C., and Wyndham A. Bewes. 1926. “The Working of the Minorities Treaties,” Journal of the British Institute of International Affairs 5 (March): 79–95. Economist. 2010. “The Vain Battle to Promote German.” 27 May. Evans, Peter B., Dietrich Rueschemayer, and Theda Skocpol, eds. 1985. Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Furnivall, John S. 1939. Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – 1948. Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel P. Moynihan. 1970. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, the Puerto Ricans, the Jews, the Italians, and the Irish of New York City. Cambridge, ma : mit Press. Gordon, Ellen J. 1996. “The Revival of Polish National Consciousness: A Comparative Study of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.” Nationalities Papers 24 (2): 217–36. Migdal, Joel S. 1997. “Studying the State.” In Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure, edited by Mark I. Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman, 208–35. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nadeau, Jean-Benoît, and Julie Barlow. 2006. The Story of French. New York: St Martin’s. Piquemal, Marie. 2013. “L’université française va-t-elle parler anglais?” Libération, 12 May. Robins, Robert S. 1976. Political Institutionalization and the Integration of Elites. London: Sage. Safran, William. 1999. “Politics and Language in Contemporary France: Facing Supranational and Infranational Challenges.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 137: 39–66. – 2005. “Language and Nation-Building in Israel: Hebrew and its Rivals.” Nations and Nationalism 11 (1): 43–63. Safran, William, and Amy H. Liu. 2012. “Nation-Building, Collective Identity, and Language Choices: Between Instrumental and Value Rationalities.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 18 (3): 269–92. Schaechter, Rukhl. 2006. “Northern Exposure: Mameloshn’s Unexpected Fate – in Sweden.” Forward, 29 September. Smith, Anthony D. 2009. Ethno-Symbolism and Nationalism. London: Routledge.

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Contr ib u tors

CATH ERI NE B A K E R is lecturer in twentieth century history at the Univer-

sity of Hull, uk . Her research interests include translation/interpreting in international intervention, language politics, and ethnopolitical conflict, with regional expertise on the Yugoslav successor states. Her articles have appeared in War and Society, History Workshop Journal, Slavic Review, International Peacekeeping, and elsewhere. She is the co-author, with Michael Kelly, of Interpreting the Peace: Peace Operations, Conflict and Language in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Palgrave Macmillan 2013), and contributed to Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict (edited by Hilary Footitt and Michael Kelly, Palgrave Macmillan 2012). She is also the author of Sounds of the Borderland: Popular Music, War and Nationalism in Croatia since 1991 (Ashgate 2010). L I ND A CA RD I N A L is a professor of politics at the University of Ottawa and

holder of the Research Chair in Francophone Studies and Public Policy. Her research focuses on language politics and policies, identity, and citizenship issues in comparative, Canadian, and Quebec politics and institutions. She has published her work in Cultures et conflits, Francophonies d’Amérique, International Journal of Canadian Studies, Minorités linguistiques et societés, Politique et sociétés, and Regional and Federal Studies, and has edited or co-edited a number of books including Le Québec et l’Irlande: Culture, histoire et identité (Septentrion 2014). She was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2013. JE A N- F RA NÇO IS D U PR É is a postdoctoral fellow in Taiwan studies at the

University of Ottawa. He holds a p hd in politics and public administration from the University of Hong Kong, an ms c in nationalism studies from the University of Edinburgh, and a ba in East Asian studies from McGill University. His chapter in this book was revised while on a visiting doctoral

fellowship at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Dupré’s current research centres on linguistic, ethnic, and national identities in the Greater China Region, with a particular focus on the electoral determinants of cultural recognition in Taiwan. He has published a number of journal articles and book chapters on language, nationalism, and identity in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Quebec. A L A I N- G. G A G NO N holds the Canada Research Chair in Quebec and Can-

adian Studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His most recent books include, as author, The Case for Multinational Federalism (Routledge 2010) and Minority Nations in the Age of Uncertainty (University of Toronto Press 2015); as co-author, Federalism, Citizenship, and Quebec (University of Toronto Press 2008); and, as co-editor, Federal Democracies (Routledge 2010), Political Autonomy and Divided Societies (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), and Multinational Federalism (Palgrave Macmillan 2012). He has earned several awards, including the Josep Maria Vilaseca i Marcet Book Award, the Marcel-Vincent award, and the Trudeau Scholar Award. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2008. NU RI A G A RCI A holds a p hd in political science and is currently an associ-

ate researcher at the Centre for European Studies at Sciences Po Paris and a temporary lecturer at the Institut d’études politiques in Lille. Funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund, her dissertation combines political sociology and public policy analysis to investigate the link between language education policies and citizenship through a comparative study of France, Germany, and Luxembourg. In 2014, she published “The Paradox of Contemporary Linguistic Nationalism: The Case of Luxembourg,” Nations & Nationalism 20 (1): 113–32. H EL A I NA G A S PA R D is a senior research associate with the Jean-Luc Pepin Research Chair at the University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on Canadian politics and public management. For the chair, she has led research projects for the oecd in Paris and the World Bank in Washington, dc , and has managed projects focused on democratic governance in partnership with Canadian parliamentarians, national and international ngo s, industry associations, and university students. Her doctoral thesis analyzed the implementation of official languages policy in the federal public

270 | Contributors

service since 1969. She has a ba (hons.) from the University of Western Ontario, an ma from Queen’s University at Kingston, and a p hd from the University of Ottawa’s School of Political Studies. X A B I ER I TÇA I N A is a research fellow in political science for the Centre

National de la Recherche Scientifique at the Centre Émile Durkheim (Sciences Po Bordeaux). In 2012–13, he was a Marie Curie Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. His main research interests are social Catholicism and politics in Southern Europe, the territorial dynamics of social economy in Southern Europe, and identity politics in the Basque Country. He has published several books, book chapters, and articles in peer-reviewed journals including Critical Policy Studies, European Urban and Regional Studies, Comparative European Politics, French Politics, American Behavioral Scientist Journal, Social Compass, Cultures et conflits, Politique européenne, Pôle Sud, and Ethnologie française. P ET ER I V ES is a professor in the politics department at the University of

Winnipeg, specializing in political theory. He is the author of Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School (University of Toronto Press 2004) and Language and Hegemony in Gramsci (Pluto 2004). He is co-editor of Gramsci, Language and Translation (Lexington 2010) and co-editor of Language Policy and Political Theory (Springer 2015) with Thomas Ricento and Yael Paled. His current research engages with the politics of language and global English appearing in Political Studies, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and Historical Materialism. He is a member of the editorial board of Rethinking Marxism and the collective of arp Books. JE A N- B A PT I S T E H A R G U I N D ÉG U Y has a p hd in social and political sciences

from the European University Institute of Florence and is currently a professor at Pablo de Olavide University, Seville. He has also taught at the Institute for Political Studies in Bordeaux, the Centre for Latin European Studies in Montpellier, the Centre for Political and Constitutional Studies in Madrid, the University of Valencia, and the autonomous universities of Madrid and Barcelona. His research focuses on territorial governance, European integration, and public policy. He is the author of several articles dealing with cross-border cooperation and regional languages published

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in international journals such as Regional and Federal Studies, European Urban and Regional Studies, Environment and Planning C, European Planning, and the Swiss Political Science Review. A M Y H . L I U is an assistant professor of government at the University of

Texas at Austin. Her area of scholarly interest is comparative politics, with a substantive focus on language politics and a regional concentration in Southeast Asia. Her book Standardizing Diversity: The Political Economy of Language Regimes (University of Pennsylvania 2015) examines language regime choice and the economic effects of this choice. She has published in Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, International Studies Quarterly, National and Ethnic Politics, and World Politics. She is currently a member of the Executive Board for the International Political Science Association on the Research Committee 5 on the Politics of Language. W I L L I A M S A F RA N is a professor emeritus of political science at the Uni-

versity of Colorado-Boulder. His research focuses on comparative politics and the politics of ethnonationalism, multiculturalism, language, and diaspora. He has written numerous articles and contributed chapters to more than forty edited books. His recent publications include The French Polity (7th ed., Longman 2009), Transnational Migrations: The Indian Diaspora (Routledge 2009), Politics in Europe (co-author, 6th ed., cq Press 2011), Language, Ethnicity and the State (co-editor, Routledge 2005), The Secular and the Sacred: Nation, Religion and Politics (Cass 2002), and Identity and Territorial Autonomy in Plural Societies (co-editor, Cass 2000). He is the founding editor of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics and the general editor of the Routledge Studies in Nationalism and Ethnicity. A S H A S A RA NG I is an associate professor at the Centre for Political Studies

of Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Her main areas of research are the political and cultural economy of development and the culture, identity, and politics of language in modern India. She has written the new introduction to V.P. Menon’s Integration of Indian States, republished after six decades by the Orient Blackswan (2014). She has also edited Language and Politics in India (Oxford University Press 2009) and co-edited Interrogating Reorganisation of States: Culture, Identity and Politics in India (Routledge 2011). She has contributed several articles to journals and edited volumes on various themes.

272 | Contributors

S EL M A K . S O NN TA G is a professor of politics at Humboldt State University in California and current Chair of the International Political Science Association’s Research Committee 50 on the Politics of Language. She has published on a range of sociolinguistic topics, including the English-Only movement in the United States, language conflict in Belgium, and minority language rights in the Himalayas. Her research on global English has appeared in Language Policy, Anthropology of Work Review, and Politique et sociétés, following the 2003 publication of her book, The Local Politics of Global English: Case Studies in Linguistic Globalization. She was a research fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Advanced Studies in spring 2012 and has received two Fulbright research awards. RO M A N SZ U L is a professor at the University of Warsaw’s Centre for Euro-

pean Regional and Local Studies. A specialist in economics and regional studies (regional development and policy) and political science, he has also published articles and chapters on theories of nationalism, ethnoregionalism, and language politics, with special reference to the linguistic history of Europe as well as minority and regional languages in Europe. His most recent article, “Minorities, Regions, Migrants and Changes in Language Policies in Europe,” was published in The New European Frontiers, edited by Milan Bufon, Julian Minghi, and Anssi Paasi (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2014). LU C TU RG EO N is an assistant professor at the School of Political Studies at

the University of Ottawa. His main fields of research are federalism, nationalism, public opinion toward immigration and ethnocultural diversity, and social policy. He has published articles in Regional and Federal Studies, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Nations and Nationalism, Canadian Public Administration, Revista d’Estudis Autonomics I Federals, Revue française d’administration publique, and the Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics. JO H N WA LS H is a lecturer in Irish at the School of Languages, Literatures

and Cultures, and the vice-dean for research in the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Previously, he worked as a lecturer in Irish at Dublin City University, with the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages in Brussels, and as a journalist for the national broadcaster rté and the Irish language television

Contributors | 273

station tg 4. His research interests include sociolinguistics of Irish, language policy, language legislation, language ideology, minority language media, and language and socio-economic development. A second edition of his book, Contests and Contexts: The Irish Language and Ireland’s Socio-economic Development, was published by Peter Lang in 2012.

274 | Contributors

I n dex

The following abbreviations follow some page numbers: f indicates a figure, t indicates a table, and n indicates an endnote. Alfabetatze Euskalduntze Koordinakundea (France), 174, 179 Anderson, Benedict, 99–100 Arabic: in France, 230–1 Ashok Pahwa Committee, 212 Authorized Translations Central Laws Act (India, 1973), 211

as job requirement, 120–1, 130; and minoritization, 72; opposition to, 128–9; percentage of in Belgium, 122; percentage of in Canada, 40, 122; percentage of in France, 173t; percentage of in Ireland, 63, 64–5; percentage of in Spain, 173t Bosnia-Herzegovina: critiques of peace-building in, 244–5; language politics in, 241; and peace-building efforts, 239–40 British North America Act (1867), 30

b&b Commission. See Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (b&b Commission, Canada) Bas-Auriol regulation (France, 1975), 174 Basque language. See Euskera (Basque language) Basque language policy (France), 176–82 Belfast Agreement (1998), 71 Belgium: 19th century linguistic issues, 125–6; 20th century linguistic issues, 126–7; bilingualism requirements of, 120; compared to Canada, 132–3; hiring quotas, 120; language policy reform in, 126–8; rate of bilingualism in, 122 Bilingual Education Act (United States, 1968), 45–6, 58n4. See also English Language Acquisition Act (United States, 2001) bilingualism: in Canada, 31, 40, 196, 200–1; in France, 174, 185n6; individual, 128–9, 130–1; in Ireland, 69–74;

California: language roadmap, 57 Canada: b&b Commission, 31–2, 129–30, 131, 195–6; bilingualism bonus, 199; bilingualism in, 31, 40, 196, 200–1; British North America Act (1867), 30; Canada First Movement, 31; Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 29, 34, 38; Civil Service Act (1918), 193–4; compared to Belgium, 132–3; Court Challenges Program, 35; courts and language rights, 34–8; designated bilingual regions in, 33, 120–1; discrimination in, 30–1; dominance of English in, 31, 39, 193–4; federal public service, 32–3, 191–2, 193–4, 195–202; French Language Units (flu s), 131–2, 192, 196–9; linguistic designation of positions, 192, 199–201; and the merit principle, 32, 136, 192, 193–4, 198–9, 201–2; minority language rights, 30, 33, 34–5, 38; Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages,

32, 41n10; Official Languages Act (1969), 18–19, 32–3, 191–2, 195–6, 200–2; Official Languages Act (1988), 33; Official Languages Plan, 37–8, 40; opposition to hiring quotas in, 120, 129, 131, 132; Parliamentary Resolution on Official Languages (1973), 200; political compromise in, 30, 32, 35–6; provincial language regimes, 32–3; rate of bilingualism, 122; Task Force on Bilingualism, 199; unilingualism in, 197, 199, 200 Canada First Movement, 31 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 29, 34, 38. See also courts, Canada Central Institute of Indian Languages, 211 Centre Culturel du Pays Basque, 177–8 Centre d’Action Culturelle de Bayonne et du Sud-Aquitaine, 178 Chinese language: in France, 228–9; in Malaysia, 139f, 141, 144, 147. See also Singapore; Sinitic languages; Taiwan Civil Service Act (Canada, 1918), 193–4 coalitions: in Basque regions, 18, 171, 175, 179–81, 183, 259; in Belgium, 7, 17, 126, 128, 133; in Canada, 17, 131–3; formation of, 18, 119, 124, 126, 128, 140–1, 151, 175, 179–80, 183, 255; in Ireland, 69–71; in peace-building, 237, 238; and power of minority linguistic groups, 17, 139, 140–3, 151, 255, 259; in Southeast Asia, 17, 137, 141, 144, 148, 150, 151n2; in Taiwan, 18. See also political parties Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies (United States), 47–8 Commission on the Restoration of the Irish Language (Ireland), 68–9 conceptualization of language, 103–5 Conradh na Gaeilge. See Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) Conseil de la Langue Basque, 179

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Coordination for Alphabetization in Euskera. See Alfabetatze Euskalduntze Koordinakundea (France) courts, Canada: as driver of language regime, 29, 30, 34–8, 39–40; languages used in, 30. See also Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; Supreme Court of Canada courts, Europe: languages used in, 261 courts, Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (United Kingdom), 31 courts, United States: languages used in, 260 critical junctures: in Canada, 21n6, 191; and Canada’s court-driven language regime, 15, 40; and Canadian and Belgian language policy choices, 17; end of conflict (or peace-building) as, 19, 238–9; in France, 18; and globalization, 17, 19–20; in India, 206; and political coalitions, 7; in Southeast Asia, 17, 140, 143; in Taiwan, 18; as tool in analyzing state traditions and policy choices, 4–5, 7, 13, 140, 141; in the United States, 16, 46–51 Deixonne Act (France, 1951), 174, 231 democracy: Belgian consensus model, 124, 125, 128, 133; and critical junctures, 141; as goal of peace-building, 19, 238, 244, 246; in India, 19, 205–6, 213–14; in Malaysia, 148–50; and multilingualism, 10, 22n7, 255; systems of, 123, 124, 255, 264, 265; in Taiwan, 18, 155, 159–60, 165–6 education policies: France, 173–4, 178, 180, 219, 222–3, 225–9, 258; India, 210–11, 213–14; Ireland, 67–8, 69–70; Kashubian, 88–9, 90; Malaysia, 141, 149–50; and multilingualism, 219–20; Poland, 87–8; Singapore, 145, 147; Taiwan, 158, 161–2; the United States, 45–6, 48, 58n4

Eighth Schedule (es ): Ashok Pahwa Committee, 212; and education policies, 210–11, 213–14; history of, 207–8; and the Indian Constitution, 207; language criteria, 212; and language policy, 206, 208–10; non-recognized languages, 214–15; official languages, 214–15; process of including a language, 206–7; recognized languages, 206, 208–9, 211–12; and social inequality, 211, 215. See also India English as lingua franca (elf ), 97–8, 101, 103, 110–11, 242–3, 258 English Language Acquisition Act (United States, 2001), 58n4. See also Bilingual Education Act (United States, 1968) English-Only movement, 46, 55–7 Enseignement de langue et de culture d’origine (elco ), 229–31 Erk, Jan, 122 ethnolinguistic conflict, 22n10 ethnopolitics: and peace-building, 239–40 European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages, 182 European Charter for Minority or Regional Languages, 89, 170, 176, 222, 229, 260 European integration: France, 222–3, 225, 228, 230; Ireland, 265; Poland, 92 Euskera (Basque language): and bilingualism, 173t, 185n6; and cross-border projects, 181–2, 183; in France, 170, 173–4, 178; organizations promoting, 178, 179; in Spain, 172, 173t. See also France; Spain federalism: in Belgium, 120, 256; in Canada, 30–1, 34, 39, 120, 256; and Canadian federal institutions, 191–2, 194–6; in India, 205, 209, 214, 216n2, 255; structures/forms of, 4, 122, 255; in the United States, 44, 46, 51–2, 58, 254,

260–1; upheld by Canadian courts, 36, 39 Fédération pour les Langues Régionales dans l’Enseignement Public, 179 France: Alfabetatze Euskalduntze Koordinakundea, 174, 179; and the Arabic language, 230–1; Bas-Auriol regulation (1975), 174; Basque language policy, 176–82; Basque people, 259–60; bilingualism in, 173t, 174, 185n6; Centre Culturel du Pays Basque, 177–8; Centre d’Action Culturelle de Bayonne et du Sud-Aquitaine, 178; compared with the United States, 175; Conseil de la Langue Basque, 179; cross-border projects, 181–2, 183; Deixonne Act (1951), 174, 231; education policies, 173–4, 180, 219, 222–3, 225–9, 258; and the English language, 225–7, 229, 263–4; Enseignement de langue et de culture d’origine, 229–31; European Charter for Minority or Regional Languages, 176, 222, 229; and European integration, 222–3, 225, 228, 230; Euskera (Basque language) in, 170, 173–4, 178; Fédération pour les Langues Régionales dans l’Enseignement Public, 179; foreign language skills in, 219; General Delegation for the French Language, 176; Haby Law, 174, 231; immigrant languages in, 229–30; Institut Culturel Basque, 178; and Jacobinism, 183, 220, 221–2, 224, 229, 232; language standardization, 172; linguistic homogenization, 222; and linguistic human rights, 222; and linguistic ideology, 221–2; monolingualism in, 220–3; multilingualism in, 219, 222–5, 232–3; Office Public de la Langue Basque (oplb ), 179–81; and other languages, 225–7, 228–9; parental free choice, 225; Regional Cultural and Language Curriculum, 174; regional language policies, 171–2,

Index | 277

176–7, 178, 180, 182–3; regional languages in, 170–1, 176, 229, 231–2, 260, 262; Rencontres Interrégionales des Langues et Cultures Régionales, 179; and the Spanish Basque, 171, 175, 181; status anxiety in, 263–4; Toubon Law (1994), 176, 222, 263–4; vernacular languages and, 176. See also European Integration; Euskera (Basque language); Spain French Language Units (flu s, Canada), 131–2, 192, 196–9 Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge), 63 Gaeltacht (Ireland), 63, 64–5, 66–7, 70–3 General Delegation for the French Language and Languages of France, 176 Germany, 264 global English: critiques of, 247–8; English as a lingua franca (elf ), 97–8, 103, 110–11, 258; in France, 225–7; non-native speakers of, 100, 102; norms of, 98, 102, 108; number of speakers, 102; Open Society Institute (osi ), 247; and peace-building, 238, 242–3; and political science, 97–8; politics of, 238, 246; in Rwanda, 239, 246; World Englishes (we ), 97, 102–3, 111 global language regimes, 16–17, 19–20, 254 globalization: and critical junctures, 17, 19–20; and language policies, 46, 98, 100, 220, 222–3, 267n4 Gramsci, Antonio, 106–11. See also normative grammar; spontaneous grammar Haby Law, 174, 231 Hakka. See Taiwan Han Chinese. See Taiwan Higher Education Act (United States), 48 hiring quotas: opposed by Canadian government, 120, 129; used by Belgium’s civil service, 120

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historical institutionalism, 4, 5, 8, 11, 267n3 Hoklo. See Taiwan identity. See language and identity India: Ashok Pahwa Committee, 212; Authorized Translations Central Laws Act (1973), 211; Central Institute of Indian Languages, 211; education policies, 210–11, 213–14; and global English, 102, 208; Indian Constitution, 205, 207, 210, 213–14; language policies in, 206, 208–10, 214, 216n2; language rights as cultural-political rights, 205–6; linguistic diversity in, 207–8, 209; number of languages used, 206; Official Language Resolution (1968), 208–9; official languages, 214–15; public services examination, 210. See also Eighth Schedule (es ) individual-bilingual regimes, 119. See also Canada Institut Culturel Basque, 178 Ireland: 20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language, 72; 1937 Constitution, 66; Belfast Agreement (1998), 71; bilingualism in, 69–74; Commission on the Restoration of the Irish Language, 68–9; education policies, 67–8, 69–70; and European integration, 265; Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge), 63; Gaelscoileanna, 70; Gaeltacht, 63, 64–5, 66–7, 70–3; Irish Free State language policies, 63–4, 65–8; language activism in, 70–1; Language Freedom Movement, 69; language use in, 265; Official Languages Act (2003), 73–5; percentage of bilingualism, 63, 64–5; Údarás na Gaeltachta, 71 Italy: language standardization, 106–7 Jacobinism, 4, 19, 183, 220–2, 224, 229, 232 Jenson, Jane: on citizenship regimes, 5–7; on representation and discourse, 121, 123

Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (United Kingdom), 31 Kachru, Braj, 98, 101–3. See also global English Kashubian: education in, 88–9, 90; European Charter for Minority or Regional Languages, 89; history of, 81–4, 85; Kashubian-Pomeranian Association, 87; as regional language, 79, 88–90, 92–3, 262. See also Poland; Silesian Kloss, Heinz, 45 Kymlicka, Will, 9, 22n6, 22n7, 97 Laitin, David, 11 language activism: in Ireland, 70–1 language and identity: among Euskera speakers, 172; in Europe, 83; explained, 79–80; in the global world, 100, 105–6, 154; in India, 205, 208–9, 212–13; and nation-states, 227, 255; and peace-building, 240; in Poland, 80; in Singapore, 146; in Taiwan, 154–5, 156, 157–8, 165 Language Flagship program (United States), 51–2 language ideology: defined, 8; in France, 221–2; in Ireland, 62–3 language policies: changes in, 256–7; choices, analyzing, 3–5, 6, 8–9, 10, 12–13, 21n3, 22n11; in France, 176–7, 180; impediments to, 264–5; intents, 254–5; and peace-building, 238; and politics, 9–10, 100, 104–5; state support for, 259; and status anxiety, 263–4; symbolic nature, 261–2 language regimes (concept of ): 5–9, 21n3, 44–5, 62, 137, 138f, 221 language rights: in Canada, 29, 30–40, 40n8, 192; as collective rights, 37, 259; in France, 259; in India, 19, 205, 213; in Ireland, 62, 72, 73; and peace-building, 239–40, 246; in Poland, 85; in Taiwan, 164; in the United States, 45, 259, 260

language standardization: Euskera, 172; Italian, 106–7; Kashubian, 84, 87–8; Sinitic languages, 156, 162 language summits (United States): Ohio, 52; Oregon, 52–7; Texas, 52 Languages Equality Law (Taiwan, 2003), 156, 163–4 Laponce, Jean, 10, 20, 100 liberalism: in Canada, 4, 36; in India, 4, 205; and individual claims for language rights, 21n4, 45, 62; in Ireland, 62, 63, 65, 70–2, 75–6; and peace-building goals, 238, 240, 243–4, 247–8; in the United States, 4, 44–5, 46–7, 52, 54, 57, 58 Lieberman, Robert C., 124 Lijphart, Arend, 124 lingua francas: defined, 137–8; distinct from mother tongues, 138, 255–6; in Malaysia, 141; and peace-building, 242; and power-neutralizing language regimes, 139; purposes, 255–6; in Singapore, 146; Southern Min, 157. See also English as lingua franca (elf ) linguistic designation of positions, 192, 200 linguistic diversity, 13–14, 207–8, 209 linguistic hegemony, 7–9, 45, 58, 106, 108, 154 linguistic human rights, 222 linguistic nationalism: in Basque regions, 178, 181; in Belgium, 126; in India, 205, 207–8; in Ireland, 63, 70, 72, 75–6, 265; and nation-state identity, 227; and peace-building, 240; in Poland, 80, 83, 87, 92; in Quebec, 31, 130, 195 linguistic normalization: defined, 154, 167n1; in Taiwan, 155, 166 linguistic recruitment, 67, 121t linguistic registers, 120, 127 Malay language: as lingua franca, 138, 144; as official language, 149. See also Singapore

Index | 279

Malaysia: and Chinese language, 139f, 141, 147; education policies, 141, 149–50; and English language, 149; Malayan Chinese Association, 148; and Tamil language, 139f, 141; the Bargain, 148–9; United Malays National Organization (umno ), 148–9, 150. See also Singapore minority linguistic groups: and coalitions, 140–1; realities for, 261–2 monolingualism: in Belgium, 120, 126; and democracy, 10; in France, 220–4; in Ireland, 75–6, 265; in Malaysia, 149; and political power, 122, 138f, 139f, 140; in the United States, 47, 51, 53 mother tongues: in Basque regions, 172; and bilingualism (Canada), 129; distinct from lingua francas, 138, 255–6; in India, 206, 210, 213–14, 215; minority commitment to, 100; right of education in, 33, 143, 213, 264; in Southeast Asia, 146, 147; vernacular languages as, 99–100 multiculturalism: in Canada, 131; and multilingualism, 10–11 multilingual citizenship, 224–5, 232–3 multilingualism: in Canada, 128; and education, 219–20; and equality/fairness, 137; in France, 222–5, 227, 232–3; in India, 213–14; and job growth, 55–6; policies of implementation, 219; in Taiwan, 163–4; in the United States, 51–8, 261 nation-state: in France, 220–2, 231–2; impact of globalization, 99–102, 105, 111; linguistic diversity in, 18; and linguistic homogeneity, 5, 10, 85, 86–7, 99, 222–3; and minority/regional languages, 81, 85; model, 5, 15–16, 18, 227–9, 231; myth of linguistic homogeneity in, 58; in Poland, 16, 81, 85, 87, 93 National Defense Education Act (United States), 47–9

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National Language Committees (Taiwan), 158, 163 National Languages Development Law (Taiwan, 2007), 156, 164 National Security Education Act (United States), 48–51 National Security Education Program (United States), 48–51, 54 National Security Language Initiative (United States), 49 Native American Language Acts (United States, 1990 and 2006), 261 nato: and Bosnia-Herzegovina, 241; and the English language, 237 non-Mandarin Sinitic languages, 156. See also Taiwan normative grammar, 98, 105, 107–11. See also Gramsci, Antonio; spontaneous grammar North Atlantic Treaty Organization. See

nato Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages (Canada), 32 Office Public de la Langue Basque (France), 179–81 Official Language Resolution (India, 1968), 208–9 Official Languages Act (Canada, 1969), 18–19, 32–3, 191–2, 195–6, 200–2 Official Languages Act (Canada, 1988), 33 Official Languages Act (Ireland, 2003), 73–5 Official Languages Plan (Canada), 37–8, 40 Ohio: language roadmap, 51; language summit, 52 Open Society Institute (osi ), 247 Oregon: business demand for languages, 52–5; language roadmap, 51–7; language summit, 52 parental free choice, 225 parity-unilingual regimes. See unilingualparity regimes

Parliamentary Resolution on Official Languages (Canada, 1973), 200 path dependency: of American language policy, 58; as analytical tool, 4–5, 140, 256; of Canadian and Belgian language policies, 17; of French language policy, 19; of Polish language policy, 16, 86–7; of Southeast Asian language policy, 137; of Taiwanese language policy, 18 Patten, Alan, 9, 22n6, 7, 97 peace-building: in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 239–40, 244; as critical juncture, 19, 238–9; critiques of, 243–6; and global English, 19–20, 238, 242–3, 244–5, 247, 266; informal intervention practices in, 242–3; interpreters/translators in, 245, 248; language awareness in, 237, 247–8; and nato , 237, 241; process of, 238–9; types of effects on language politics, 239–40; universal peace-building models, 238 Pennycook, Alistair, 98, 102–6 Poland: education policies, 87–8; European Charter for Minority or Regional Languages, 89; and European integration, 92; German language in, 85–7, 90–1; linguistic nationalism, 80; nation-state model, 16, 81, 87, 93; policy changes, 88, 90. See also Kashubian; Silesian political parties: in Belgium, 125, 126–8, 135n11; in Britain, 150; in Canada, 38, 125, 131–2; in France, 177, 224; in Ireland, 72; in Malaysia and Singapore, 144–5, 146, 147, 148–50, 151n2; in Taiwan, 155–6, 157–61, 163–6, 167n6–8; in the United States, 48, 59n6, 267n2. See also coalitions political science: comparative politics as subfield of, 4, 11, 15, 17, 254; and global English, 100; and language policy, 9–13, 253–4, 263–4; political theory as subfield of, 9–10, 22n7, 97, 98, 105, 107–10; rational choice, 11, 17, 22n9, 267n3

Regional Cultural and Language Curriculum, 174 regional languages: in France, 170–1, 172, 176, 229, 231–2, 260, 262; in India, 212, 215; in Poland, 16, 81, 88–92, 262; in Spain, 172 Rencontres Interrégionales des Langues et Cultures Régionales, 179 Republic of China. See Taiwan Rhode Island: language roadmap, 57 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (b&b Commission, Canada), 31–2, 129–30, 131, 195–6 Rwanda, 239, 246 Scott, James, 245–6 Silesian: as dialect, 79; history of, 81–2, 84–5, 86; Movement for Silesian Autonomy, 90–1; official recognition of, 90–2; Upper Silesian Council (Rada Górnośląska), 91. See also Kashubian; Poland Singapore: Chinese language in, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147; education policies, 145; English language in, 147; Malay language in, 145, 147; People’s Action Party (pap ), 144–7; Tamil language in, 144. See also Malaysia Sinitic languages, 156, 158. See also Chinese language Skocpol, Theda, 4, 11, 22n10 sociolinguistics: compared to political science approaches, 12, 13; defined, 21n1; and global English, 100; as rubric for studies of language policies, 3, 13 Spain: bilingualism in, 173t; crossborder projects, 182, 183; and Euskera speakers, 172–3, 173t. See also France spontaneous grammar, 105, 107, 108–11. See also Gramsci, Antonio; normative grammar state tradition (concept of ): 4–5, 256 status anxiety: and language policy, 263–4

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Supreme Court of Canada: created, 31; language rights rulings, 34–7, 39. See also courts, Canada Taiwan: Austronesians, 155, 156; co-officialization movement (2003), 155–6; Democratic Progressive Party (dpp ), 155, 159, 162–3; education policies, 158, 161–2; English language in, 163; Hakka, 155, 157, 162, 165; Han Chinese, 154, 156–7; history, 156–61; Hoklo, 155, 156, 162; Japanese language in, 155, 157; kmt government/party, 157–9, 162–3, 165; language and identity in, 154–5, 165–6; Language Equality Law (2003), 163–4; language standardization, 162; Languages Equality Law proposal (2003), 156; linguistic normalization, 155, 166; Mandarin language in, 155; National Language Committees, 158, 163; National Languages Development Law (2007), 156, 164; Southern Min as lingua franca, 157. See also Chinese language Tamil language: in Malaysia, 139f, 141, 148, 149; in Singapore, 144 Texas: language roadmap, 51, 59n10, 59n11; language summit, 52 Toubon Law (France, 1994), 176, 222, 263–4 trilingualism: in Singapore, 144–5 20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language, 72

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Údarás na Gaeltachta, 71 unilingual-parity regimes, 119, 121t. See also Belgium United Malays National Organization, 148–9, 150 United States: Bilingual Education Act (1968), 45–6, 58n4; Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies, 47–8; education policies, 45–6, 48, 58n4; English-Only movement, 46, 55–7; foreign-language policy, 46–51; Language Flagship program, 51–2; National Security Language Initiative, 49; Native American Language Acts (1990, 2006), 261; ndea , 47–9; nsea , 48–51; nsep, 48–51, 54; Spanish language use, 52–3; state language roadmaps, 51–7; Voting Rights Act (1975), 45–6 Utah: language roadmap, 57–8 vernacular languages: in France, 170, 176, 179; as mother tongues, 99–100; in Taiwan, 157, 158 Vološinov, Valentin, 104 Vossler, Karl, 103–4 Voting Rights Act (United States, 1975), 45–6 World Englishes (we ), 97, 101, 111. See also global English