The relationship between the political community, exercising its power through the State, and linguistic, ethnic or other minority communities which exist within these political borders yet do not themselves control the State, is inevitably tense. The 'ideal' - 'one race, one language, one State' - has only been expressed in such extreme terms by fascist Germany. In this chapter we aim to examine 'top-down' language planning by States who try to establish, maintain and protect the status of their official language, and increase its status outside their own borders, noting that for many States the other 'ideals' of fascism are anathema. In all cases it is the political community that decides, as a matter of policy. How this is done varies greatly from country to country, and indeed from time to time. It can be done without legislation as such or through formal declarations, making language one of the symbols of the State along with the flag or the national anthem.
Hungarian
Hungary, and speakers of Hungarian (Magyar), have found themselves at the centre of many European battles over official languages. Hungarian speakers are scattered over a widespread linguistic community where political changes have meant that States have come and gone while speakers have continued to inhabit much the same geographical territory. Political borders have rarely coincided with those of language use. Many Hungarian speakers have found themselves firstly in States where their language was prized as that of the majority, then in successor States where Hungarian was the language of a minority, and sometimes in States where Hungarian was marginalised and all but persecuted. Hungarian may dominate; need to be protected; be decried and sometimes outlawed; be regarded as the symbol of political opposition or a symbol of international solidarity.
The ancestors of modern Hungarians left the Volga plains about 1500 BC, spent some four centuries from the fourth to the ninth centuries AD in the southern Russian steppes in close contact with Turkish and many other languages, reached the Carpathians in 896 and settled in roughly their present area from the tenth century. A number of linguistic influences affected the language, which, since it is of the Finno-Ugric family, is quite different from its neighbours.
All have left traces of their influence on modern Hungarian. Protestantism raised the status of German; Catholicism that of Latin, and both languages have provided new vocabulary from which Hungarian has borrowed. Hungarian power was considerable for six centuries from 1000 AD, controlling an ill-defined territory - roughly that of the former Roman Pannonia - stretching towards Poland, Bohemia, the regions under the control of Kiev and/or Austrian powers, and ruling much of the Balkans to the South including most of Croatia and a good part of Serbia. But this power was based on feudalism, subject to constant wars which increased Hungarian strength (in the twelfth century), demolished it (in 1240 with the Mongol invasion, in 1301 with the end of the native Arpad dynasty, and again with the growth of Habsburg domination), and refashioned it so that the country contained, under the Angevin Kings in the 14th century, a huge range of languages, administrative systems and economic interests with little logic or fellow-feeling among the constituent groups. Constant war with the Habsburgs, the Austrians, and the Ottoman Empire, led to the weakening of power and control by the Turks for more than a century. The language rarely achieved political prestige, and its demise was even predicted in 1791.
The principal domination in the eighteenth century was that by German in the Austrian Empire. It was during this century in particular that the ethnic and linguistic divisions of the Empire sharpened: Slav speakers and Hungarian speakers demonstrated a new-found sense of nationalism in riots and wars, but the same demand for tolerance and understanding was notably lacking towards Romanian, Slovak or Serb minorities in these self-same regions. By 1867, after Prussian defeat of Austria, a double monarchy was created and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was born. Hungary, at this time, could be said to have become a fairly compact State with centralist traditions, favouring the assimilation of other groups.
Hungary became independent after the First World War and the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. The history of the defence of language rights, and the lack of them the population of Hungary had suffered, meant that language debates and language laws were closely associated with political ideologies during both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Hungarian State was reduced to the areas where Magyar was in the majority (it lost two-thirds of its pre-war territory): Croatia joined Serbia, Transylvania joined Romania, Slovakian regions were reallocated to Czecho-Slovakia.
Much of the language debate between the World Wars was for some conditioned by beliefs that the Magyars had inherited the prestige of the Huns, and the close association of language and political rights was based on a mixture of nationalism, racial purity and the desire to regain political control over the one-third of Magyar speakers now living outside the Hungarian State. The net effect of the political turmoil is that about ten million Magyar speakers live in Hungary itself. A further two million live in Romania; some five or six hundred thousand in Slovakia; a further similar number in the former Yugoslavia, in the Serbian province of Voivodina; some two hundred thousand or more in the Ukraine and a few thousands in Austria - not to mention the millions who have left Europe altogether and now live in the United States or Australia.
In all the European areas there remains considerable linguistic turmoil, with constantly changing language legislation, breached as much as obeyed, and associated with a mixture of persecution and opposition in a range of policy areas from housing to economic advantage.
It is against a background such as this that linguistic legislation needs to be judged. In its more extreme forms, such legislation often tends to decree unity: that the State, the Nation, the people and the language are all one; and imposes a requirement that all citizens assimilate to this concept. In order to evaluate such legislation, commentators need to know:
The Hungarian Nationalities Act of 1868, which started with the 'explanation' that all Hungarian citizens formed a single, indivisible and united nation irrespective of the nationality to which they belonged, and that Magyar was thus the official language, is generally decried as 'infamous', mainly because the penal code gave no remedies for citizen's rights and thus in effect relegated non-Hungarians to the rank of second-class citizen. Secondly, the code made it an offence to incite riot against any nationality having its home in Hungary. This could be interpreted as meaning that any support for local independence, autonomy or national/linguistic awareness was an attack on the Magyar nation, and led to a number of show trials against Slovak nationalists. Thirdly, the 'magyarisation' process by which the civil service operated in Magyar and, in effect, recruited and promoted only Magyar speakers, discriminated against, for example, Slovak speakers.
French
An example from more recent times is France. In 1992 France declared French to be the language of the French Republic, as one of the Constitutional changes necessitated by the Maastricht Treaty (Ager, D. E., 1996c). The debate which accompanied this declaration stressed the symbolic nature of the language, and the absolute necessity for France to place it on the same level as the other cultural symbols of what it meant to be French - the flag, the slogans and descriptive phrases, the anthem. Interestingly, the first formulation claimed French as the language of France, and politicians had hastily to reverse the formula to 'The language of the French Republic is French' when they were politely reminded by Belgians, Swiss, French Canadians and indeed many others that the language was also used outside France. The symbolic declaration was given substance by a law of 1994, replacing one passed in 1975 but found to be ineffectual in safeguarding French, particularly in preventing the inflow of English words and expressions.
Previous legislation of 1539 had required French to be used in the Courts; and in the laws of the French Revolution, French was declared as the language of administration and of education. In fact, the 'Language Terror' imposed on Strasbourg and the German-speaking Alsace region in the early years of the Revolution showed both how extreme some language laws can be - the requirement was that French alone be used by people who did not know the language and had never used it, and the punishment in some cases was death - and how language laws can symbolise political policies and attitudes. The logic was unassailable: the language of liberty, French, had to be imposed since opponents of the new regime intended to keep the populace in backwardness and ignorance by using the local German dialect. In this view, France itself could only be created through the common use of French. Hence, it was the duty of a Government to regulate language use, if necessary by force: freedom by decree.
The 1994 'Toubon Law', so called after its proposer, the then Minister of Culture, Jacques Toubon, decreed that French must be used in six main domains: education, commerce, the media, the workplace, public service and the conference industry. An officially approved vocabulary had to be used by public servants (who include all teachers, researchers and many workers in non-privatised utilities and industries). Civil servants' career prospects were to depend on their use of French, and a supplementary Circular from the Prime Minister to all Ministers underlined this in April 1994. Punishments, ranging from fines to imprisonment, were to be levied on those contravening the law. Public debate at the time was generally in agreement that something should be done, despite accusations of Fascism, the despair of linguists about such misguided attempts to impose language use by decree, and a specific reference of the Act, by the Socialist Opposition in Parliament, to the Constitutional Council to see whether it breached the fundamental principles of the Constitution. The decision was that any attempt to impose language use on the general public was unconstitutional, but that the Government had every right to require public servants to use French and there was nothing wrong with imposing quotas of French music on radio and TV stations, enforcing the use of French in colloquia or in advertising. Many British newspapers - and indeed some French ones - had a field day chortling about 'Mr Allgood' (i.e. M. Toubon) and his ludicrous Law attempting to ban 'Anglo-Saxon', but few of them made any serious attempt to understand the motives nor the sense of offence many French citizens clearly felt about the take-over of their culture and way of life by alien influences.
The effectiveness of laws like these is certainly higher than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, when the enforcing agency for the previous French Act quickly discovered it had better things to do than lay itself open to ridicule by conducting a vendetta against small-time businessmen who had the temerity to label their car sales businesses 'Showroom' rather than using a French term. There were one or two show trials - of British Airways, for example - but these led to squabbles with the European Commission about free competition and a humiliating climbdown.
The Toubon legislation took the precaution of sounding out the Commission first and using the 1992 Constitutional amendment and the GATT negotiations on the cultural exclusion concession to get the Act through and make sure it could be presented as part of anti-American, pro-European legislation rather than simply anti-English; but nonetheless one of the first announced victims of the 1994 Act was a British firm (The Body Shop), fined in late 995, and the Commission has been notified of objections in the case of insurance contracts, where both German and British firms have been obliged to draw up documents in French even though their operations apply throughout Europe and they may have only minor interests in France. Overall, during 1994 the government organisation charged with identifying incidents had investigated 1,918 cases, found 308 offences, issued warnings for 201 of them and transmitted 107 cases to legal officers. To judge by the outcome of the 165 cases transmitted in 1993, which had resulted in only 22 convictions, the effort is great but the results less so.
Switzerland and Belgium
At least two European States have accepted that they cannot, and do not wish, to achieve or defend monolingual official policies: Switzerland and Belgium (Siguan, 1996, 69-75). In both these cases at least two languages are accepted at the official level for all purposes, although the practical outcome is different and there remain considerable difficulties. Both demonstrate clearly the importance of the territorial principle, and in both it is in practice possible for monolingual individuals to exist within defined parts of the country. In Belgium the present situation is a compromise outcome from a situation in which language has often been the symbol of conflict. In Switzerland, the equilibrium is harmonious and generally problem-free.
Belgium is a particularly complex country insofar as its linguistic communities are concerned. It was formed in 1830, and at that time French was the language of the elite, of power and of the government; the Flemish (Dutch) speakers felt themselves to be in the position of a weak, powerless minority. Since then, with increasing economic and political power, the Flemish community has gained power and independence, to such an extent that it is now the French-speaking Walloons who feel themselves to be in the minority position - and they are in fact only about 30% of the population.
There have been many Constitutional changes since the 1939-1945 War, and the position at the end of the 1990s is that the country has become a federation made up of the two main linguistic communities, each with a strong sense of its own identity, each with its own political structures and powers, but with a central Federal Government whose powers are mainly external. The Belgian Constitution establishes four linguistic regions - the Flemish, French, German and the bilingual region of the capital Brussels; and three linguistic Communities - the French, Flemish and German. It had been intended that political and social powers would be split between Communities and Regions, and that the Communities might be enabled to protect or support their speakers even when these were located in Regions where their languages were not in the majority; but in practice the Flemish Regions and Community are one, and the practical rights of the German community and region are limited - education from the secondary level, for example, is normally in French or Dutch.
The four-language situation of Switzerland, and the harmonious relationship between languages and government, are often held up as a model for countries where language-related strife is common. The four languages are national languages, although Rhaeto-Romansh is not an official language as the others all are. The languages are spoken in fairly clearly delimited territorial zones, and it is the cantons which decide most matters connected with their use - in education, the law or political life - so it may well be the existence of these prescribed zones of language usage which have avoided many of the problems of language-based conflict which have affected other States.
The German Community is by far the largest in Switzerland - some 73% or more of the population. The German-speaking region is also the richest, includes the Zurich area where more than 10% of the Swiss population now lives, and which is the base for most of the financial activities and power. Swiss German has recognised dialectal differences with standard German, but the linguistic awareness of the Swiss population and their economic and political weight - they form some 5% of the total European German-speaking population - means that this dialectal form has considerable prestige of its own despite its apparently inferior situation as a minority within the German speech community. French in Switzerland is nonetheless stable, and even sufficiently prestigious in Switzerland to allow towns like Geneva and Lausanne to resist the cultural domination of Zürich or even Paris. But like German, speakers of the language are aware of its minority position within the French speech community, and also within Switzerland.
Italian is the third Swiss language in terms of power, numbers and political strength. Like French, it is in a minority in terms of the political control of the country, but unlike French has no major town in the cantons speaking it, and is very subject to increasing immigration from Italy itself. Like French-speaking Switzerland too, the Italian part is very subject to domination by German-speaking Zurich. But it is the Romansh part of the country which demonstrates the problem of survival most clearly. Romansh is spoken in both Switzerland and Italy; has a long history in Switzerland of domination by German, represents only 1% of the Swiss population and only 39% or so of the population of the Grisons canton where it is centred. Pressures against its maintenance are strong:
The State and the official language: defending a symbol with corpus policy
States protect the status of the official language by a number of means quite apart from the brutally simplistic one of passing a law to enforce penalties for not using it. Language Academies have long been set up to look at the actual language as it develops and to make sure that there is some official control or at least approval for new vocabulary. Some States control the language used in the media - often on the excuse that without such control the use of violent, sexually explicit or offensive terms would be widespread, and this type of official approval is often very helpful to governments concerned at attacks on themselves or their own personnel, or on their own view of what society should be or on the business practices they regard as normal. Other States influence the dictionary makers, the editors or publishers of books and magazines, or provide subventions for professional associations of sub-editors or proof-readers. One should not exaggerate State influence in areas like these. In most European countries the publishing industry is completely free of State influence, and it is the general consensus of the industry itself that maintains language norms, in much the same way that the speech community does. But the opportunity for political control of speech, and hence of thought, is never far away from actions such as the establishment of a preferred terminology for a subject area, or official approval for the expressions to be used in sales and employment contracts.
Language Academies
The French Academy, by far the best known of the European language Academies, is by no means the first nor even the most effective. Set up in 1634 as an informal gathering of interested courtiers, its potential and value were quickly identified by Cardinal Richelieu, and its formal constitution was approved by the Paris Parlement the following year. Ever since then, it has been a meeting of forty 'Immortals' from literature and the arts, inevitably elderly and rarely expert in linguistics. One of its purposes was to standardise the language; another to 'render it capable of expressing the arts and sciences, and becoming a satisfactory instrument of Government'. It set to work with a will, and published its first Dictionary in 1694. It soon discovered however that there was little hope of achieving agreement on the more complex areas of style or literary form, and gave up attempts at regulating these. It made no specific attempts at regulating administrative language, either. Over the years it has published new editions of its Dictionary fairly regularly, including spelling corrections and changes in them, but it has had much less success with its attempts at defining grammatical accuracy: its most ambitious attempt at a grammar of the language published in 1932 was howled down by professional linguists and it has perhaps wisely left the field to commercial publishers since.
Nowadays, the Academy sees its role as being that of following usage, rather than of determining it, and barely sees itself as an arm of Government. Indeed it has been on more than one occasion critical of what it sees as excessive Governmental action in attempting to dictate what should be said or how the language should develop. It opposed recent language reforms - on sexist language, on spelling reform, and was more or less ignored in the debates over the Toubon Law. From the other side, it is generally venerated as a respectable part of the Establishment, although it tends to be regarded as irrelevant to the job of regulating scientific and technical terminology.
The first of the European language Academies was probably the Italian Accademia della Crusca, set up in Florence in 1582-3. Its first dictionary was published in 1612, and its role today remains much as it always was - a centre for language research - and although it played a role in the determination of standard Italian in 1862, the formal recommendation then was made by a specially appointed Commission under the leadership of the author Alessandro Manzoni.
The Royal Academy for the (Castilian) language was set up in 1713 in Spain. Unlike France, it was set up so that its membership included linguists and philologists, who could thus enable it to be an authoritative body, and its pronouncements on language are generally regarded with respect. In Germany the seventeenth century saw the foundation of a number of language societies. The most important was set up in Weimar in 1617, and concerned itself with attempts to rid the standard language of dialectalisms and to decide on matters of correctness; it also dealt with borrowings from other languages and with the proper role of archaisms. But Germany was a country of small princedoms until unification in the nineteenth century, so none of the societies was really able to take on the role of authority for German.
Other Academies were established for Hungarian in 1825, Romanian in 1879, Basque in 1918 (but without legal status until 1972). Sweden did not get its Academy until 1786, although the idea had been mooted in 1652. Britain nearly got one in 1712 after a petition to the Crown by such figures as Jonathan Swift, Pope and Congreve, but for some reason - and the authorities are unsure why - it was not set up, and the British Academy, although it has interests in a range of cultural matters, is mainly known for its work in painting and for its role supporting Humanities research generally.
Academies suffer from the fact that they are generally ineffectual: if they contain prestigious citizens, such citizens do not wish to follow political priorities, and if they do not contain prestigious citizens they have no effective voice. They are often purist, see language change as equivalent to corruption and decay. Their strengths and weaknesses reflect their innate but necessary elitism and conservatism.
The control of terminology
Academies are often ill-suited to devising or gaining acceptance for the terminology of a scientific area or for agreeing the sense to be given to words and expressions in legal documents, or in new technology. For these purposes some European States have set up official language offices or give government support to research centres in the expectation that they will set up Terminology Banks or specific translator support mechanisms with a range of approved terms.
France has thus established the Délégation Générale à la Langue Française, one of whose main jobs is to co-ordinate the work of Terminology Commissions in each Ministry and provide specific technical assistance as required. These Terminology Commissions set up an agreed list of the meanings of certain words or expressions, arrived at after a lot of consultation and debate among representatives of the Ministry itself, but also and mainly of the relevant industry and occasionally of the consumer groups. The resultant list - often not very long - is published as an official Ministerial order, and the terms must be used. But since the decision of the Constitutional Council in 1994, such Terminologies are not binding on the ordinary public and although occasional publicity is given to words like baladeur to replace Walkman, or bogue to replace (computer) bug, their fate in the general language is open to doubt. From the point of view of the Government, their purpose is to propose French words to replace English borrowings, but are open to considerable criticism. Some terms are imported along with the referent and there hardly seems much point in searching for new terms when it is the object itself that is perhaps objected to (English 'spot' replaced by bande promotionnelle); some proposals do not cover the full meaning of the original (parrainer to replace sponsoriser); some have been absorbed into the language and have often lost any meaning in their original language (clip); some really do not need a Ministerial Commission in order to come up with what is proposed (disque compact, boumeur). Some linguists conclude that the whole exercise is pointless; others that such language management is essential to the future independence of the language and the society that uses it. It must be said that much of the impetus to do this sort of work in France derives from the experience of Quebec, where the need was perhaps greater and certainly different from that of France.
The unofficial language planners: mass media, dictionaries and all that
Newspapers are often condemned as being full of jargon, as containing examples of the worst excesses of language play and the greatest attacks on the 'proper' corpus of the language. Examples abound in almost any language of ways in which journalists telescope information, give a new twist to reality, shock and startle their readers, and push the language to the edge of understanding. The publishing industry, too, is responsible for the language although in a rather more considered and long-term way than the media: its copy-editors, its type-setters, its manuscript readers although rarely identified, rarely specifically trained for their job, and rarely able to come together in professional associations or other fora, carry out much of the task of keeping published books accurate, comprehensible and acceptable. Such unofficial language users are the arbiters of taste and even in countries like France with a strong tradition of State control it is only at arm's length that interference takes place - for example through consultation over language reform proposals like the spelling reform of 1990 (Ager, D. E., 1996c).
The State and the official language: protecting a symbol with educational policy
Gillian Shephard, speaking to the Conservative Party annual Conference in 1994, spoke about the pride citizens should feel in the proper use of their own language:
It's our heritage. Not only is it the tongue of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, it is now the language of the world, uniting continents. And here at home why should anyone expect to get a job if he or she can't speak or write clearly in our marvellous language. I shall use my time as Secretary of State to campaign for the use of plain, simple, effective English - not just in the classroom, but in the media, in industry and commerce, even in Parliament.
She is said to have been surprised by the response to her speech - numerous letters were published in the Press and many comments sent to the Department. So much had she found a subject which could provoke a response, indeed, that she repeated her speech the following year - almost word for word. It is not surprising that it should be a Minister of Education who found herself in the role of linguistic expert. Education policy requires there to be a definition of language correctness: teachers must agree on what is acceptable and examiners must be prepared to decide when a pupil's use of the language exceeds the licence allowed to creative artists. Britain has only recently adopted a National Curriculum, but a component part of this is an official, Government-approved language policy which specifies for the first time the forms and types of exercise, teaching style, tests and language which will be acceptable. This has come about after fierce battles with teachers and educational experts, and is still not altogether accepted as being the job of Government. Educational policy in France is even more prescriptive. The Ministry publishes from time to time a list of the departures from orthodoxy which markers may accept - in spelling, grammar and style - and both the programmes for individual subjects and the marking schemes examiners have adopted for school subject examinations are approved and published by the Ministry.
Spreading the official language outside Europe: winners and losers
There have been two main modern periods when European countries deliberately tried to establish their hold over countries and continents outside Europe:
Colonisation and settlement have ensured the spread of European languages outside the strict confines of the original country. But there are other influences, and there is no doubt that the motivations of European States for supporting the use of their language outside their borders are now very mixed.
In the 1990s, Mandarin Chinese is spoken by some 850 million people world-wide. followed by English with about 450 million. Hindi, with 363 million, comes next, followed by Spanish with over 300 million speakers. Russian has a similar number, while Arabic has over 200 million speakers; Bengali nearly as many; Portuguese about 150 million; Japanese 130 million; German 110 million and French about 100 million. Italian has about 60 million speakers (Ager, D.E., 1996a, 44). These statistics are very approximate. But they do show that European languages are widely known, and, unlike Chinese, Hindi or Bengali, that they are known to, and used by, those for whom they are not a maternal language. How far do the European States see it as their duty to propagate and defend 'their' language world-wide? And how far is this still possible?
Portugal
Portugal was one of the first maritime nations to seek riches across the world. In the fifteenth and sixteenth century Bartolomeu Dias, who rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1487, Vasco da Gama, who opened the route to India in 1497, and Cabral, who took Brazil in 1500, showed how adventurous they were. The Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 divided the world between Spain and Portugal, and it is thought that Portuguese sailors probably discovered Australia. Portugal, too established an overseas Empire.
Brazil was first colonised in the sixteenth century, and Portuguese had to compete there both with a lingua franca derived from indigenous languages and with the Creole African slaves developed (Baxter, 1992). Interestingly, the lingua franca was prohibited from official use in Brazil in 1758, and Brazilian Portuguese started to show significant differences from the European language during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There remain today some 170 indigenous languages in use, plus a number of European languages apart from Portuguese spoken by groups of immigrants both new and old. Brazil became independent in 1822, and codification of the Brazilian forms of Portuguese - particularly in spelling - was undertaken by the Brazilian Academy which still approves standard dictionaries. Brazil's population of 130 million far outweighs that of Portugal (some 10 million) and the language is considered to be the national one, so there is little continuing influence from Portugal itself; indeed, Brazilian Portuguese is fast becoming the main international form of the language - principally through a major export trade in soap operas for TV. There are linguistic differences between the Portuguese and Brazilian forms, although in most cases Portugal and Brazil have agreed to adopt the same forms, and there are continuing attempts to do so through a common Language Council.
Portugal first colonised African areas in the sixteenth century, and today five States use Portuguese as their official language - Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique and São Tome and Principe. These did not finally achieve their independence until 1975, and the language they used until that time was officially the Portuguese of European Portugal; since, they have gone some way towards changing the status of the indigenous Creole. As with other African ex-colonies, the European language exists in a multilingual environment, and with the decreasing importance of Portugal on the world scene, Portuguese itself is to some extent giving way to international languages like English - due to the nearness of South Africa to Angola and Mozambique - and French. Indeed São Tome and Principe, and Cape Verde, have joined the international 'Francophonie' organisation made up of French-speaking nations and regions. Nonetheless Portuguese retains the major role in the media, and the role of Portugal within the European Union and the access this gives former colonies to European money and influence means that African countries are sometimes torn between Brazil or Portugal as their model, despite the general unwillingness of Brazil to play a major role on the international scene, and the inability of Portugal to play a major financial or military role.
Spain
The effect of the Spanish discovery and exploitation of Central and South America is well-known: not merely did it ensure that the potato would be the staple diet of many Europeans, but it introduced venereal diseases - Montezuma's revenge - and the possibly worse evil of rampant inflation as South American gold wrecked Spanish wealth. But far more significant in its long-term effect, the Spanish language is now widespread and is fast becoming the second language of the United States of America. Spanish is today spoken in more than twenty countries, including, quite apart from Spain itself and the United States of America, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Uruguay and Venezuela. The language is the second most widespread European language after English, and is significant not merely in that its use represents the legacy of a major Empire but also that it has become the main, if not the sole, language of the countries where it is used. Spanish is not merely a language of the elite in former colonies, as is the case with French, but is the language of the whole population and as such has developed urban vernaculars and popular varieties outside Spain. The distribution of Spanish also means that although there are two main varieties - the Iberian (Castilian) and the South American (for which Mexican is usually regarded as the norm), many countries develop their own norms and there is enormous inherent variety in pronunciation, vocabulary and usage. The Royal Academy in Spain works with numerous Academies or language councils based in the other Spanish-speaking countries despite these differences.
Interestingly, Spanish is the second language of the United States, and as such is entering a period of direct conflict with English. A number of the States have already declared English to be their official language - a sure indication that there is some doubt that it might be - and with the growth of immigration it is already difficult to live in the United States without at least some knowledge of Spanish. Use of the language is fast becoming a declaration of social status - Spanish is the language of the underclass - and one must expect that before long there will be attempts to ensure a reversal of the current greater prestige of English. At that point, the whole basis of the United States will be brought into question.
France
French sailors, fishermen, settlers and pirates early spread French to North America, to the Caribbean, to India, to islands of the Indian Ocean, and to Africa (Ager, 1996a and 1996c). The early expansion was followed by setbacks: France lost considerable areas as a result of the collapse of the first Empire in 1760. It retained a foothold in Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion and the Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint-Domingue (Haiti)) from which came much of the wealth of some leading members of the French government. Later, Napoleon conquered most of Europe and the Middle East, but without establishing lasting colonies. During the nineteenth century France expanded into North Africa - Algeria was conquered in 1830, although battles continued until 1847; the Pacific, with Tahiti and French Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna, and New Caledonia from 1840, although French settlement of New Zealand and Australia was prevented by prior claims and brute force by the British. In Africa, from 1852 to 1865, France expanded from the North, from the South and from the West to conquer an immense empire, bigger in this continent than that of the British. In 1840 treaties were concluded with the Vietnamese Empire to modernise their armies, but the second and third opium wars of 1856-1860 led to an easy military conquest of Saigon, followed by the establishment of protectorates over Cambodia and six Vietnamese provinces. At the turn of the century the Union Indochinoise was established: 740,000 square kilometres, 10 to 11 million inhabitants, covering present-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
There are now speakers of French in all the continents. The French used in European countries other than France - Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Aosta Valley - is subtly different from standard French, and these frontier regions do not share fully the attitudes, vocabulary or preferences of the French of France. Francophone Africa is normally multilingual, with French only one of a number of often competing languages, and each language often has defined functions and particular uses. French is often an elitist, minority language, a vehicle for science, technology, commerce and diplomacy. Depending on the country and its history and situation, a version of French may however be in popular use - for example in the Ivory Coast and Senegal. French is in any case part of the multilingual mix of Africa, confronting not merely local languages but other exogenous languages as well, particularly English.
The contemporary situation of Quebec, where French and French-based values are in conflict with English, and Guadeloupe, where the continuation of conflict is based on a battle with the locally developed Creole, illustrate the conflicts French faces. Quebec has suffered rejection since the 'repatriation' of the Canadian Constitution from Britain in 1982. In 1980 Quebec had rejected complete independence from the rest of Canada by 60%-40%. The 1990 failure of the Lake Meech accord between the Federal and Provincial Prime Ministers to resolve Quebec's demands, and of the 1992 referendum on the Charlottetown agreement on the Constitution - which had been carefully prepared by numerous Commissions and a massive public relations exercise, but which was nonetheless rejected by 54.4% of the electorate and by six of the ten Provinces - led to a hardening of Canadian Anglophone attitudes towards possible autonomy for the province.
Economically, there is not much doubt that Quebec, whose Gross Domestic Product is bigger than that of Denmark and as big as Belgium's, could exist independently. Politically, the internal problems - with the native peoples, immigrants and other groups, and particularly the nature of the relationship with the rest of Canada - mean that independence would not necessarily solve all the difficulties. But the 30th October 1995 referendum, which Federalists won by 50.6%, did not quite produce independence, although it seems almost inevitable that this will come at some stage, and then Quebec will become an independent, French-speaking country in North America, as de Gaulle had hoped in his provocative speech in Montreal in 1967. Quebec has affirmed its language rights in increasingly strong terms: the province is monolingual and the range of language defence mechanisms placed in position to defend Quebec's right to use French represent the most complete legal mechanism for the protection of a language minority anywhere in 'Francophonie', and have often served as a model to France in developing its language laws. Nonetheless, the danger of being swamped by English is still present: if 67.2% of new immigrants used French in 1986, 72.4% of them also used English.
Guadeloupe is a good example of an area in which the sociolinguistic situation assigns different roles to standard French, to Creole and to other languages. Linguistically, Creole is the normal language of Guadeloupe, with standard French in the official role, in education and in administration; for the French Government in Paris, Guadeloupe has no other language than this official French since the Département is an integral part of the French Republic. The ethnic mix of the population is 80% descendants of slaves, 10% originating in south-east Asia, 5% 'Creole Whites' and 5% from France, mainly administrators posted for a tour of duty. As elsewhere in France, it is only recently that citizens have any rights to use a language other than French, and, indeed, the 1994 Toubon law insisting that French alone be used by public servants may well have the effect of ensuring that administrators and population become even more alienated from each other.
The conflicts between French and other languages across the world are really of three types:
The French belief in the universality and importance of French cultural values for mankind could be seen even during the time of massive colonial expansion in the nineteenth century, when it was possible for official figures to say 'We affirm that the work of colonisation of the Third Republic is fundamentally one of civilisation', and to note that 'Our colonies will not be French in mind and spirit until they understand French...Particularly for France, the language is the necessary instrument for colonisation' (quoted in Ager, D. E., 1996a, 12). This attitude has remained consistent, and although French is widely disseminated it has not varied or developed local varieties which might act as regional linguistic or cultural norms. The role of Paris is still predominant and deliberately fostered by France: of all the French speakers in the world, more than half live in France, and it is inevitable that Parisian French and the cultural, social and political values of France will dominate. From this point of view it is possible, somewhat unfairly, to allege that 'Francophonie' still represents a form of European intellectual domination[1]. Some consider that this is continuing even in international organisations like the Francophone summit meetings, where nearly 50 countries or regions meet to debate the advancement of Francophone interests. Certainly France itself provides massive support for its language and for cultural diplomacy. French is seen by the French authorities to be a worthwhile item for cultural export, and there is heavy subsidy both of the international 'Francophonie' movement which ensures media collaboration between French-speaking countries and also of organisations like the Alliance Française, whose purpose is to undertake French language teaching (Ager, 1996c).
English
The winner among the European languages in terms of its international and widespread usage is however clearly English (Burchfield, 1994). Although there are political and commercial reasons for this there are also linguistic reasons: English is particularly noticeable for the ease with which it borrows and incorporates words from other languages: its vocabulary is after all a mixture of Germanic and Latin roots, and it borrowed massively from French until the fourteenth century. English is a comparatively easy language to learn: no complicated morphology and a fairly straightforward grammar. English speakers are tolerant: they are quite happy to make efforts themselves in order to understand a pronunciation which is not that of southern England, and prepared to accept approximations to grammar and style by learners or second-language speakers who have retained quite a lot of the preferences, rhythms and pronunciation characteristic of their own original language. The varieties of the language found in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, the United States or Canada are both understandable to speakers of each and also not tied to any one centre for ideas of perfection: there is a norm for each of these speakers. Indeed there is much discussion about whether the various forms of English used over the world are one language or many: American, Indian or Australian types of English, as opposed to American, Indian or Australian Englishes. But particularly important is the fact that there exists an 'international English', a reduced form acceptable for international negotiation in any domain, and which is widely understood.
Australian English derives from the many dialects spoken in what was at first a convict settlement mixing people from a wide range of social and regional origins. The particular characteristics of the variety rose from this mix and from such features as contact with Aboriginal languages or the specific experience of living in a vast, varied country where the flora and fauna, the agriculture and even the industry, differ from those of the country/countries of origin. New words like kangaroo, dingo, wallaby, billabong, boomerang entered the language to describe new realities; existing words and expressions like magpie, walkabout, referred to different realities. The extent of such vocabulary and the frequency of its use should not be underestimated: it very quickly becomes obvious to any visitor to Australia that words like tinnie, creek, station, barramundi and yabby are common parlance.
The effect of Maori words and linguistic habits on New Zealand English dates from James Cook's notes on his circumnavigation of the two islands in 1769, when he claimed the country for the British. The influence of Maori on New Zealand English is particularly strong in vocabulary: place-names, often somewhat adapted from the original Maori, are used (Waitangi, Whangarei, Rotarua); many New Zealanders use pakeha for a non-Maori; kauri (a tree), kiwi, kumara (sweet potato), poi (ball used in dancing), hangi (celebration meal) are terms in general use. But there are many other influences, too: the Scottish settlement in South Island, the Anglo-Catholics in Canterbury, the Devon settlers in North Island, Irish immigrants to South Island in the 1870s and 1880s, Australian gold-seekers in the 1860s, constant immigration from Britain - particularly the South - until very recent times, and, slowly, Asian and Pacific immigration for the last twenty years or so.
In South Africa, English came up against two major linguistic groups which have affected the development of a specific norm: Dutch or its South African variant Afrikaans, and the number of Khoisan/Bantu languages spoken by the original inhabitants into whose lands both white groups moved during the nineteenth century. It took until the Act of Union of 1910 for both English and Afrikaans to be accepted as official, and the struggle between the two traditions has had numerous consequences - for example the Soweto riots of 1986 which were fired among other things by the obligatory use of Afrikaans as a teaching medium in African schools. The country is still widely bilingual in these two languages at an official level while the speakers of African languages are necessarily often multilingual. Of the 35 million or so of the population, about 10% are English first language speakers, 25% Afrikaans speakers, 17% Zulu and another 17% Xhosa. There are of course in South African English a number of vocabulary items, mostly Afrikaans, with particular South African connotations - stoep, kopje, kraal. Some words derive from the political or social situation, and may also relate to a particular time - apartheid, Kaffir, township. South African English has a specific and recognisable pronunciation, marked by short vowels. Such differences from the British norm are striking enough for it to be quite clear that the richest country in South Africa, as it develops its wealth and political power, will develop also its language practice and if it retains English, confirms its use at the official level, and develops its use as a national lingua franca, may have major effects on international English as such in the future.
In South Asia and the Indian sub-continent the contact English had with the local peoples again produced a recognisably different standard variety of the language, if not two: the differentiation between Indian and Pakistani varieties of the language has become more marked in recent years, and it may well be that the political independence of Bangladesh will produce yet a third. In any case the vast numbers of English users mean that 'beneath' these standard languages there is an enormous range of varieties, conditioned by the nature of the transaction, the interlocutors, their knowledge of the learned language and a range of other factors. English has survived since the time of British domination in spite of modern Indian language policies aimed at countering the effect of Lord Macaulay's Minute of 1835 which deliberately introduced English into education throughout the sub-continent, and hence attempted to create people 'Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect'. The effectiveness of this piece of social engineering cannot however be disputed. Indeed, Indian authors and publishers make India the third largest English-language book producers in the world; even in average size cities there is an English-language newspaper; radio and television make widespread use of the language.
As an Indian language, though, English is part of a complex multilingual mixture: it is nearly always learnt as an additional language, it is a pragmatic language used for specific purposes, and, since it is learnt in the educational system, its pronunciation often imitates spelling. One of its main characteristics is the stress, rhythm and intonation of its pronunciation; another is the complements (for enjoy reading, enjoy to read); yet another is the widespread isn't it? tag question. A large number of words have entered sub-continent English and indeed many have become widespread in standard British English: bangle, bungalow, curry, dungarees.
The United States and Canada are the real powerhouse of international English, however. The economic and political strength of the United States means that it is impossible for traders or diplomats anywhere in the world to have no knowledge of American English. The United States of America, gaining their independence from Britain in the late eighteenth century, originally depended on immigration from Britain. But the massive immigration from Europe and farther afield which took place in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has had major effects on English and on the relative prestige in which different languages are held. Such publications as Webster's 'American dictionary of the English language', appearing in 1828, established an American norm, accepting spellings like color and center, and although some linguists consider that the only differences between most varieties and standard British English appear in such spellings, in vocabulary (pavement, hopefully, fall, faucet, suspenders) and in some phrases (I'm missing you already), there is little doubt that Americans agree that their language is identifiably different from British English. American in the United States has developed internal dialect differences, most notably between the North and the South, but also - and this has been specifically recognised in recent years for reasons other than linguistic ones - with the development of Black English varieties. The use of English is 'threatened' by increased use of Spanish throughout the United States, particularly in border areas and in urban centres such as Los Angeles and New York, and Presidential candidates ritually talk about their language policy - which usually means, at least for the Right, 'protecting' English - in terms which remind the observer that many States have now passed laws declaring English as their official language.
The Caribbean has nothing like the economic strength of the United States, and it is probably in the islands of the area that English has developed farthest away from its British norm, to the extent of creating a Creole which is often extremely difficult for speakers of the English or American standard to understand. There may be a notable impact of such Creole on British English in Britain, although it is not maintaining its former strength or separateness within immigrant communities in the British Isles, and increased immigration from the Indian sub-Continent has somewhat weakened its effect.
Overall, English - particularly its American form - currently dominates international relations in significant areas, in technology, trade and diplomacy. It is widespread as a native language; it is the most widely learnt foreign language, and its role as second language is unsurpassed. Britain supports the business of English language, which is a major earner for publishing houses, although not for the Government, which has set its face against deriving financial or cultural benefit from such a trade and no longer supports work by the British Council in this field. There is much greater support for cultural diplomacy from the US government (Phillipson, R., 1992).
Pidgins and Creoles
International English is a sophisticated form of a contact language, a linguistic pidgin. Originally, pidgins were also called trade languages: they developed from the necessity to trade in areas of the world where no common language existed. Pidgin languages were, as contact languages, limited to one domain of use: the business in which they were useful - selling goods, giving instructions, passing orders. Most developed from English, Dutch, French, Portuguese or Spanish and traditionally used the grammar of an African or Pacific language and added the vocabulary of the European one, developing to the status of a Creole as they became mother tongues. Most are now used outside Europe, particularly in areas of the world which were previously colonies, or which continue as dependencies of European nations. French overseas Départements such as Guadeloupe or Martinique, British colonies such as the Bahamas or former colonies such as Jamaica maintain such Creoles, and they are much used by immigrants to European countries, posing a number of linguistic problems for the educational system: should the Creole be taught? should it be eliminated from the speech of immigrants? should it be maintained as a marker of (ethnic) unity? Creole usually has a low level of prestige in European countries, so decisions such as these have considerable effects on the self-value Creole speakers can have. European countries do not generally support Creoles, and prefer to spend money supporting the official, standard language rather than such variants.
Notes
1 'The French believe, with all their being, that there exists a human truth, belonging to everybody, which can be comprehended by intelligencce and expressed by (at least the French) language'- quoted in Guillorel, 1995, 334.
