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Towards Openly Multilingual Policies and Practices

Assessing Minority Language Maintenance Across Europe

Multilingual Matters

Introduction

Who is multilingual, and what kind of a society can be called multilingual? Do you need to master more than one language 'perfectly' and acquire them in early childhood in order to be really 'multilingual'? What does this imply for minorities who have not been able to acquire and use their heritage languages to their full potential? Can education make you multilingual, and how should this be done? Are some languages better, more useful, more real, more authentic or more valuable than others?

These questions are seldom asked. Instead, we understand and manage multilingualism as if we already had answers to them. These answers, as will be shown in the following sections, arise from the monolingual bias: the unfounded but unquestioned tacit assumption that monolingualism is the natural and default condition of human beings and societies.

1.1 The Monolingual Bias Underlying European Linguistic Traditions and Language Policies

This section will first introduce the reader to the current understanding of European multilingualism. It reveals that, no matter how multicultural Europe may seem, the view on the diversity of languages spoken there still derives from what is known as the monolingual bias.

1.1.1 All multilingualisms are not equal

From a global perspective, multilingualism is the norm rather than an exception; it has been estimated that the average person grows up using three languages (García, 2009; García & Schiffman, 2006). There are no monolingual states in the world, and most people do need multiple languages in order to manage their everyday lives. It is true that not all states have endorsed an official multilingualism, like, for instance, South Africa, which has 11 administrative languages; and India, which has 22. Instead, many states have opted for official monolingualism in the political and legal spheres, pushing all languages but the dominant one into a marginal position. Yet, even in the face of direct prohibition and discrimination, minority languages were and are spoken at home and among relatives and friends (Lasagabaster & Huguet, 2007).

European history shows a remarkable emphasis on monolingualism developed by force or persuasion over the years of state and nation building. As late as the 1970s, the dominant language ideology in Europe stressed that children whose native tongue was a non-dominant language were to be 'healed' and 'normalised'; the education system was supposed to transform them into monolingual speakers of the dominant state language. For example, Adler (1977a: 40) wrote that 'bilingualism can lead to split personality and, at worst, to schizophrenia'. In other words, the emphasis in the multilingualism debates was – and sometimes still is – on the negative impact of multilingualism. It was believed that the use of multiple languages in childhood might destabilise the personality and provoke identity problems (for critical discussions of this view see e.g. Cummins, 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1982, 2000).

As is also reflected in the European Language Diversity for All (ELDIA) case study reports, all over Europe, the language ideology described above was supported by assimilatory policies. The ideology of 19th-century pseudo-Herderian linguistic nationalism – the belief that multilingualism is harmful both to the individual and to the nation – established itself in Europe partly before World War I and immediately after it (see e.g. Blommaert & Verschueren, 1998; Kamusella, 2009; Gal, 2015) and lived on through most of the 20th century. This ideology emphasised the need for one national culture to guarantee the wellbeing of all citizens on the same basis (Ngugi, 1987). As illustrated by the following quotation, the legacy of these policies can still turn up in everyday contexts; even in today's Europe, teachers and healthcare professionals may still discourage parents from speaking to their children in their mother tongue if it is not the language of the majority.

Despite the ideology stressing the linguistic and cultural unity of the state, multilingualism has always been an organic part of the everyday life of millions of Europeans. In practice, however, multilingualism in the European context is still largely seen from the perspective of majorities and of state languages. At the level of language policies, multilingualism is understood as the knowledge of major European languages, the default case being that people with an assumedly monolingual background acquire these language skills in the education system. The meaningfulness of teaching (certain) foreign languages to everyone – or learning them, for that matter – is far too seldom questioned. Rather, the teaching of 'useful' languages is regarded as a necessary investment in the competitiveness of the country in the global market. For this, the society concerned simply must find the resources.

The multilingualism of minorities and migrants, acquired at home and largely employed in group-internal communication, is, in contrast, implicitly regarded as a burden. In societal discourses, it is framed in terms of costs and workload: costs for the society and extra workload for language learners belonging to a minority, who need support for both learning the national language and maintaining their own heritage language. Consequently, languages are implicitly (or perhaps even explicitly) divided into two categories. The high-status 'major' or 'international' vehicular languages (as well as the national language in each nation-state) are languages that should be learned and are, accordingly, the main target of nationwide language education policies. The low-status or subordinated (Grillo, 1989: 174) 'minority' languages are seen as ethnic attributes rather than tools of communication and identity construction or as carriers of cultural values (cf. Lambert, 1979). 'Minority' languages are often dealt with as if they were of no interest to anybody outside the speech community, and the practices and policies pertaining to them may belong to completely different – and often regional – language-political frameworks. In the worst-case scenario, in the practice of language planning and education, 'the monolingual habitus of (even) multilingual schools' (Gogolin, 1993) ends up making potentially bilingual speakers (of less prestigious, 'ethnic' minority and migrant languages) monolingual while simultaneously attempting to make originally monolingual majority-language speakers multilingual in international vehicular languages.

1.1.2 The monolingual bias in linguistics ...

The dominance of monolingual ideologies in linguistic research is often attributed to the enormous influence and prestige of Noam Chomsky and his followers in Western linguistics since the 1950s. Chomskyan linguistics assumes a 'homogeneous competence' model (for criticism, see e.g. Jessner, 1997; Herdina & Jessner, 2002: 30ff), seeing language as a monolithic, static system based on a hypothetical 'Universal Grammar' – which is universal because it is genetically determined for all human beings alike. According to this view, the human capacity for language is monolingual in essence, and multilingualism is a secondary object of study that can indeed be investigated only after the corresponding aspects of language faculty in its 'pure', monolingual form are known well enough. Moreover, this view almost inevitably leads to seeing individual multilingualism as the presence of multiple monolingual language capacities; in other words, as 'parallel monolingualisms' (Heller, 2006).

Chomskyan linguistics also emphasises the crucial difference between (genetically conditioned) mother tongue acquisition – which can only take place in the critical age in early childhood – and second-language learning. This implies that 'true' bi- or multilingualism is only possible as a consequence of bi- or multilingual language acquisition in childhood, and that 'native speakerhood' is something essentially different from language skills that are acquired later in life (for a critical discussion, see Davies, 2003). For speakers of endangered languages, this view also highlights the fatal and final character of language loss. If you have been hindered from acquiring 'your' language at the critical age (which is true of many minority-language speakers whose parents did not speak the language with them in their childhood), then, according to this view, you will never be able to become a 'real native speaker'. The purported lack of 'real' native speakers of a given minority language also commonly turns up in debates on bi- and multilingualism. It is used by non-linguists as an argument against lending financial support to the language, as the following quotation illustrates:

Dom beskriver det ju i princip som att det här är ett språk som snart inte längre har några människor som talar det som första språk längre. Och det innebär ju inte att ett språk på nåt sätt dör ut i och för sig. Men det blir en helt annan sak, då blir det just att man lä... det lite grann den situation som Jiddish har idag. Att det finns egentligen ja, möjligtvis några mycket gamla tanter alltså som har Jiddish som sitt första språk. men annars är det ju mer att det är ett språk som man kanske bestämmer sig för att lära sig lite grann för att kunna ha en kontakt med kulturen och så vidare.

'They [activists] describe it in principle like that this is a language that soon no longer will have any people who speak it as a first language anymore. And it does not mean that the language as such will somehow die out. But it becomes a completely different thing, then it will be just that one learns ... a little bit the situation that Yiddish has today. That there are actually, well, possibly some very old ladies, that is, who have Yiddish as their first language. But otherwise it is more that it is a language one maybe decides to learn a little bit to be able to have a contact with the culture and so on.'

Swedish politician in one of the ELDIA control group interviews for Sweden (SE-FINFIT-FG-P-01m)

However, it must be borne in mind that monolingual ideologies were not introduced into linguistic theory by Chomsky (or Saussure). They are part and parcel of the idealisation of language-as-a-system, languageness (see e.g. Garner, 2004).The term refers to the view that each language, as an autonomous system mastered by an ideal native speaker, is complete in itself. This implies that multilingualism can only mean separate monolingualisms existing independently alongside each other. This idea is present in all Western theoretical (autonomous), descriptive and prescriptive linguistics from ancient Greek and Roman grammar-writing onwards. It is the basic assumption behind Saussurian structuralism and also in classical (Neogrammarian) historical-comparative linguistics, which is based on discovering and describing the 'laws of nature' that determine units of closed, autonomous systems and their changes.

1.1.3 ... and specifically in the research of Finno-Ugric minority languages

Already in the 19th century, Neogrammarian linguistics – which focused on (re)constructing an authentic language form – were conspiring with the emerging Romantic Nationalism and numerous European projects of national language planning. This is particularly important in the case of the Finno-Ugric languages investigated in ELDIA, as the foundations of classical comparative Finno-Ugric studies were laid in the spirit of Neogrammarianism. Following the positivist research tradition, until recently, Finno-Ugric language studies were largely characterised by the search for 'authentic' dialects or the pure language X spoken by idealised, monolingual speakers. Partly, this tradition persisted throughout most of the 20th century for political reasons: most Finno-Ugric minority languages were spoken in the Soviet Union and were not accessible to Western researchers, who had to work with archive material collected in traditional communities before World War I. In some cases, most notably in the field of Hungarian studies (hungarológia or magyarságtudomány, see e.g. Kovács, 2008), this tradition also conspired with nationalist ideas of purity and authenticity: Hungarian studies came into being also as a reaction to the peace agreement of Trianon 1920, which turned large numbers of Hungarians into minorities in Hungary's new neighbour states (see e.g. Fenyvesi (ed.), 2005) and made the maintenance of the Hungarian language and identity an acute political concern and an important object of Hungarian minority studies.

Focusing on authenticity meant that even obvious foreign influences or linguistic practices resulting from multilingualism and language/dialect contact (such as code-switching or the use of mixed codes) were filtered out as 'secondary', uninteresting or even undesirable developments. Of course, field researchers collecting dialectological data among Finno-Ugric speech communities were well aware of multilingualism and contact phenomena and commented on them, for instance in their field reports. Due to the prevailing research paradigm, however, these phenomena were not part of the central research agenda (with the exception of loanword studies, which have always played a central role in Finno-Ugric linguistics). This is reflected in the classical documentation of many minor Finno-Ugric languages, and it also applies to varieties traditionally regarded as dialects of the Finno-Ugric state languages, such as Meänkieli, Kven or Võro/Seto. Up to the present day, Kven and Meänkieli have been treated as varieties or dialects of Finnish, and Võro and Seto as varieties or dialects of Estonian. Furthermore, focusing on language varieties perceived as 'pure' and 'authentic' has led to the neglect of whole speech communities, as those dialects that were thought to be less interesting for historical-comparative linguistics or dialectology were simply ignored. Until ELDIA, a particularly ill-studied Finno-Ugric minority language was Karelian, spoken in Finland (see Section 3.8).

The consequences of the monolingual bias in the Finno-Ugric research traditions became obvious even in the first information-gathering phase of the ELDIA research project on which this book is based. The languages of 'old' (indigenous/autochthonous) minorities (for instance, Karelians in Russia, North Sámi, or Hungarians in Burgenland, Austria) have traditionally been described from the point of view of the 'authentic' language variety. With the exception of Karelian in Russia and Hungarian in Burgenland (Sarhimaa, 1999; Gal, 1979), usually there are no detailed, up-to-date descriptions of multilingual patterns of language use, code-switching or code-mixing. Within our fieldwork, it was possible to fill these gaps only to a modest extent. However, we hope to draw the research community's attention to these 'white spots', stressing that the recordings and transcripts of our interviews will constitute valuable material for further, more fine-grained linguistic research.

1.2 From the Monolingual Bias to the Idea of a Multilingual Europe – On Paper Only?

In recent years, both policy makers and researchers have begun to see multilingualism as an essentially positive phenomenon. European language policies celebrate multilingualism: Multilingualism is a European asset! Two+! Every European citizen will learn at least two foreign languages! Linguists, psychologists and education professionals emphasise that speaking many languages is good for you. So is the general consensus then that all multilingualism is beneficial and that all forms of multilingualism are equally important?

By no means. Despite all the lip service paid to multilingualism, language policies do not focus on multilingualism as a phenomenon but, typically, concentrate on promoting the use of certain languages in certain environments and contexts. Multilingualism in itself, as a dimension of human behaviour, is actually seldom recognised. And while linguists increasingly question the idea of languages as autonomous entities with clear borders, many minorities may feel tempted to emphasise the idea of their language as an entity, the 'real language', a symbol and the carrier of their ethnic identity.

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Excerpted from Towards Openly Multilingual Policies and Practices by Johanna Laakso, Anneli Sia Sarhimaa, Spiliopoulou Åkermark. Copyright © 2016 Johanna Laakso, Anneli Sarhimaa, Sia Spiliopoulou Åkermark and Reetta Toivanen. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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