Posted by Denis Costaouec on February 28, 2011
 
Denis Costaouec is a senior lecturer in linguistics and general phonetics at the Paris University of René Descartes as well as a member of the SeDyl laboratory (CNRS, Inalco, IRD). He is currently working in Mexico, in the only village home to speakers of Ixcatec, a language of the Oto-Manguean family severely threatened with extinction.

Along my work as a field linguist (Paraguay, French Brittany, Mexico), I’ve often witnessed situations where populations had shifted from traditional monolingualism (in some variety of Guarani, in Breton, or in an Oto-Manguean language) to monolingualism in the State language (Spanish or French) over quite a brief period (2 or 3 generations) of endured and problematic bilingualism.

These cases are frequent enough to be worth pondering, and I do stand in favour of the theory according to which there are many situations in the world where ancestral popular monolingualism seems to encourage a disuse of the primary language in cases of imposed bilingualism. A process that usually leads to a new form of monolingualism in the dominant language.

We must first consider that lasting monolingualism is a grassroots daily reality in certain areas of the world.

Certain local situations described as bilingual or plurilingual actually hide dominant monolingualism: that was the case, for example, of the Ottoman Empire where numerous linguistic groups coexisted, sharing the same space, sometimes the same villages, within a social organization based essentially on religious distinction, without the slightest will for linguistic unification.

Nevertheless, such a favourable context to plurilingualism stemmed a great variety of situations: alongside merchants and local figures who could speak several languages including Turkish; poor peasants – especially women – living in situations of local monoligualism as accounted by various chronicles and even recent studies.

In such situations, only few people find themselves involved in social relationships imposing some form of contact with the language of power, or other languages. The most frequent outcome is a majority of the population being monolingual: when nothing in daily life requires contact with populations who a speak different language, monolingualism remains an appropriate an sufficient response to social needs of communication.

Thus it is important to take the full measure of this lasting monolingualism, both in the scope of the world it contributes to develop, and in the feeling of language-world uniqueness it induces. One can easily understand the shock, and probably the trauma, caused by the irruption of another language in this elaborate construction.

In these situations, the infliction of a second language, often that of the State or the invader, creates a conflicting and troubling situation. The primary language loses value to those who spoke it, the teaching of language 2 is uneven, and its command remains insufficient for a long time, which appears to be socially stigmatized. Such inflicted bilingualism comes across as harmful, trouble.

A regularly observed outcome of differences in status between two languages, reflecting differences in status at political and economic scale among different fractions of the population, is the abandonment of the primary language to the benefit of a new form of monolingualism, this time in the dominant language.

The policies of a large number of nation states have not ceased to reinforce this trend of popular monolingualism by imposing monolingualism in the official language designated to replace indigenous languages in every aspects of social life. Thus the success of State monolingualism is also based on the traditions of local monolingualism.

In order to introduce policies that promote plurilingualism for the people, and not limited to ruling classes or influent social categories, the following conclusions may be drawn from the thoughts above: any support of plurilingualism must take the described situations into account, as well as their inner logic: the use of languages depends on how much of a social need they are.

Positions promoting plurilingualisme « per se », therefore, should not be relied on, including those raising the argument of democracy (rejection of inequalities due to the command of one single language, defence of cultural diversity, increase of autonomy, eased mobility both on social and geographic scale, etc.). The promotion of plurilingualism for the working-class must reach beyond the rhetoric designed for those who are immediately involved in international exchange, the European construction, or globalized trade. And it cannot limit itself to the promotion of certain State languages (French, German, Spanish…) against the prevalence of English.

In order to be understood and accepted, the promotion of plurilingualism must build in the promotion of « other » languages: languages of immigration as well as regional languages.