Linguistic protectionism

From Freepedia

Linguistic protectionism is any state policy introduced to protect a given language from the expansion of a "stronger" language (usually a language with a much greater number of speakers), or against mixing (or deliberate compatibility) with a different dialect or a closely related language. The expansion of a "stronger" language may take two forms: (1) people switching to the "stronger" language and (2) people using words from the "stronger" language in the context of the "weaker" one (i. e. using loanwords excessively). The opposition to the latter form of language expansion is known as purism.

Possible forms of linguistic protectionism are (from milder to harsher):

• maintaining a standard language and providing neologisms to replace loanwords
• providing subsidies for learning the "weaker" language and for publishing and broadcasting in it
• making the "weaker" language an obligatory school subject
• requiring that all state employees have a degree of proficiency in the "weaker" language
• requiring that all education is in the "weaker" language
• forbidding the use of the "stronger" language in some or all spheres

Cognate languages

A common case is when the "weaker" and the "stronger" languages are very closely related. It is usual for the speakers of the "stronger" language to suggest that the "weaker" language is "just a dialect". In their turn, the speakers of the "weaker" language vigorously deny such claims, and go to great lengths to prove that their language is quite separate.

For instance, in the 19th century it was common to consider Ukrainian and Belarusian languages to be dialects of Russian (this point of view was reflected in 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica). Today, however, many Ukrainians and Belarusians will take this as a personal insult.

Yiddish also has been subject to allegation that it is just a dialect of German; in fact, a native German speaker can understand a lot of Yiddish if spoken slowly, the same is true for the Dutch language.

Writing systems

Closely related languages often tend to mix up. To prevent this, people impose different writing systems on them, or, if the same script is used, they use different spelling.

The extreme case was with Moldovan and Romanian languages, which are virtually identical in all respects, except that Moldovan used Cyrillic script, and Romanian used Latin script.

Other example is Yiddish, which is very close to German, but uses Jewish script instead of Latin letters, and so keeps its separateness. This results in the situation where, for example, an Israeli could read out loud a Yiddish text to a German (who could not read Hebrew), who could understand it, while the Israeli could not.

The next example is Hindi and Urdu, which are kept traditionally separated by using Devanagari and Arabic script, respectively. This is a well-known example often cited in linguistic texts; however, in recent decades, it has been observed that the languages are tending to drift much further apart, due to the active and preferred borrowing of Arabic loan-words by Urdu (as is the case in many non-Arab Islamic countries), combined with the opposite tendency and preferrence to incorporate Sanskrit words into Hindi, as an alternative to foreign loan-words, whenever new vocabulary is needed.

Serbian and Croatian languages also differ mainly in using Cyrillic and Latin scripts, respectively (and formerly they were considered to be just variants of one language, Serbo-Croatian).

See also

linguistic Darwinism, linguistic imperialism, official language