engleski

Multilingual Reality vs. Monolingualist Ideology

Language diversity is no modern European monopoly. Multilingualism as a social phenomenon is not a specialty of this age, since many premodern societies were multicultural and multilingual. But comparing two separate slices of time, modern and premodern, we find clear differences. Multilingualism, and with it multiculturalism, have become "open" questions, since language-based identities have become prominent in the public sphere. The paradox of modern multilingualism is manifest when differentiation is resorted to in order to gain better understanding of these differences. Promoting the Other and otherness reinforces one's perception of his own identity, but also helps understanding of other identities which, like all identities, constantly change. Their dynamic quality results from shifts in space and in time, from contacts and interpenetration which involve interculturalism and intercultural communication. A policy of monolingualism – language uniformity – on the one hand impoverishes the single identity, and on the other leads to a loss of plural identities. Yet multiple identities are what we need today to counterbalance power and domination. This looks different in practice, so that, paraphrasing Bourdieu, we conclude: if one language has greater symbolic (hence also economic and political) value vis-à-vis other languages, then the community associated with it will be dominant, privileged, and unwilling to be equalized in rights (even in language rights) with other communities. A language's symbolic value is reflected in its communicative value: higher symbolic function guarantees wider communication range. Thus multilingual reality comes into conflict with the ideology of a single language as an important cohesive force which is called upon to defend or build up national identity. Analyzing and comparing certain European language policies in the first decade of the 21st century, we will find a similarity with the Jacobin ideals: minority languages are subordinated because they deny the equality of all citizens/speakers, while competence in the majority language not only guarantees everyone's access to various domains of public communication – hence everyone's equal rights – but also becomes a legal duty of immigrants, members of allochthonous (non-native) minorities. In Europe today about 50 million speak one of the minority languages and some countries have multiple languages in use. In large European cities with a very heterogeneous population, elementary communication requires a lingua communis, which, as one can expect, is the prestige or majority language, the official one, which "opens all doors". Thus there are two parallel processes: the promotion of monolingualism among the privileged and of bi- or multilingualism among the stigmatized (as in ancient Greece), who, if they happen to opt for the majority language, most often cultivate only one language in the next generation, the official, majority language. One can observe an analogous case in the official and working languages of the European Union, where the global English language, even if it is itself heterogeneous, points to the existence of a socio-historically and socio-politically defined ideology of monolingualism.

multilingual reality; monolingualist ideology; modern Europe; minorities

LINEE - Languages in a Network of European Excellence