11.2 revisi

11.2 Language policy
 Language politics can be defined as the struggle to influence or participate in the formulation of and implementation of policy regarding the uses to which certain languages and language varieties will be put, as well as whom these policies will favor and whom they will affect adversely. Such policies are often formulated “for the common good,” thought in a linguistically diverse state, any linguistic policy is likely to discriminate. For example, it is not economically or otherwise feasible to set up school instruction in everybody’s vernacular. Complete equity rarely result because such matters are decided not by humanitarians and scholars but buy pratical politicians responsible to powerful leaders and constituencies for the solution of practical problems.
 Kloss (1986) has identified a series of stages of government attitudes toward language. A particular language may be recognized as any one of the following:
1. Sole official language (e.g. French in France)
2. Joint official language (e.g. French and Flemish in Belgium)
3. Regional official language (e.g. Ibo in eastern Nigeria)
4. Promoted language: lacks official status but used by government in dealings with public (e.g. Spanish in Southwestern United states)
5. Tolerated language (e.g. Basque in France)
6. discouraged language (e.g. Macedonia in Greece)
Among the human rights which all people should be able to enjoy are language rights. There are language rights which are promotion-oriented, that is, where public authorities make use of the foreign language in their own activities; and there are toleration-oriented language rights, that is, those which allow the minorities the right to use the language in domains where the citizens themselves, not the authorities, become active. A common position is that the acquiescent rights should be granted whenever a group is willing and able to make the necessary exertions, but that linguistic minorities can lay no claim to promotion-oriented rights (Kloss 1971).
There is no universal consensus that immigrants, for example, necessarily and automatically are entitled to language rights. There are arguments both for and against granting such rights. Usually the dominant group feel that the immigrants ought to give up their language as soon as possible. One arguments is that immigrants, by the very fact of immigration, have tacitly agreed to adapt themselves to the new country. Yet, many came to the New World to escape minority status abroad and, under certain conditions, were able to cultivate their language more vigorously in the Americas, for example, Albanian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Syrian Arabic. Another argument claims immigrants ought to assimilate because of the economic benefits they have gained but fails to take into account the economic contributions of the immigrants themselves as producers and consumers. Finally, the dominant group may be afraid of the formation of new ghettoes and the threat to national unity if language rights are granted.
On the other hand, Article 27 of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights adopted by the United Nations on December 18, 1966, and Article 5 of the Convention Against Discrimination in Education, adopted by UNESCO on December 14, 1960, recognize that ethnic groups have the right to maintain their languages. A more specific argument is that parents have the rights to choose the type of education they prefer for their children and to have them study any branch of learning they choose. It is furthermore advantageous to the state to have a reservoir of billingual citizens who may serve as bridges between countries. But perhaps the strongest argument is the cultural enrichment which state and society derive from the presence of a variety of languages and language-based cultural traditions.
Language rights can be based on either the principle of territoriality, in which case the language used in a given situation will depend solely on the territory in question, e.g. a particular province, or on the principle of personality, in which case language use will depend on the linguistic status of the person or persons concerned, e.g. membership in a particular ethnic group. In the first instance, use is determined by community membership. In latter case, the basis for classification may be either objective or subjective, that is, determined by either ethnic sentiment or a preference for one of the languages the individual knows (McCrae 1975:33, 41-44). In the case of the application of the territoriality principle, a minority within the designated territory may have to make some concessions, depending on whether the policy instituted is unilingual or bilingual, and of what sort.
The linguistic policy of newly independent countries is normally affected by such factors as: the length of the period of colonial rule, and whether during that period there was more than one colonial power in posession; the amount of education provided by the colonial rulers, for what classes, to what level, and in what language; the manner of achieving independence, and relations subsequently with the former colonial power and its allies (Le Page 1964:45).
Rulers of multilingual states of followed three types of language policies in order to promote a particular language over all the others. Interestingly, each one of these policies has been followed at one time or another in Russia or the Soviet Union. In the first type, the language of the most powerful nationality is imposed upon the other nationalities, and the use of their language is probhibited. This was Czarist policy and the policy in Hungary after Magyar replaced Latin. In the second type, a supranational legitimacy is conferred on one language derived from religious, cultural, or ideological considerations, as in the case of Soviet policy, and that of Ottoman Turkey, the Hapsburg Empire, and the British colonies in India and Africa. The third type of policy is to create new languages by the elevation of local dialects or variants so as to ensure the supermacy of a favored language. This policy has been carried cut in places like Yugoslavia, where creation of the Macedonian literary language has neutralized the competing political claims of Serbians and Bulgarians on the Macedonians. Divisiveness has been promoted among the Turkey dialect of Soviet Asia so as to guarantee the supermacy of Russian.
Pre-World War I multilingual empires, like the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, generally followed repressive policies toward their minorities in language, as in other areas. Hungarian administration in their half of the Dual Monarchy was particularly oppressive, as the Magyars tried to transform their ancient multinational kingdom into a Magyar national state. In 1833, the official language was changed from Latin to Magyar. The resulting Magyarization of governmental administration aroused the deep resentment of Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, and Romanians. The Magyar nationalists has demanded constitutional reforms, liberal legislation, and independence from the Hapsburgs. But the “liberation” of the Magyars meant the “oppression” of the non-Magyar peoples within Hungary itself (Kohn 1965:49)
Some of the modern states which succeeded the multilingual empires after World War I have been even less liberal toward the minor ethnic groups. In the Soviet Union, language equality is nominal rather than real. For example, a Ukrainianor Latvian who migrates to Siberia is expected to send his children to a Russian school, but a Russian who moves to Riga or Odessa is not expected to send his children to a Latvian or Ukrainian school (Kloss 1967).
Soviet language policy elevated the importance of Russian among the non-Russian peoples by elevating dialects into languages so as to prevent the formation of large blocks of homogeneous language speakers, e.g. Turkish, which might oppose Russian dominance. The devide-and-conquer policy was never so successfully applied to language problems, as minor dialectal differences were exaggerated by enlarging on them. The development a possible regional non-Russian language was effectively blocked. Russian necessarily became the lingua franca of the entire county. The teaching of Russian in all non-Russian schools became compulsory in 1938. Also the late 1930s saw the shift from the Latin to the Cyrillic alphabet for non-Russian languages, except for those well-estabilished, literary languages which had their own non-Cyrillic scripts such as Armenian, Georgian, Yiddish, and the Baltic languages. The soviet government at the time released an undisguised Russification program, in the interests of promotion the learning of Russian and the spread of Russian culture, Peoples wishing to develop the resources of their own languages rather than borrowing Russian words or international words in their Russian form, or Muslim peoples who wanted to borrow from Arabic, Turkish or Persian, were condemned as “local bourgeois nationalists” (Goodman 1968:725-728).