[REVIEW] La bataille des langues
Mar. 13th, 2008 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThe monthly Le Monde diplomatique (official website, English edition) is one of the first publications that I discovered online. Although it took me some time to discover that its decidedly left-wing and occasionally French/Euro-nationalist leanings could certainly bias its coverage, it still offers quite a few interesting articles for the critical reader.
Most recently, I was pleased to happen across the latest edition of Le monde diplomatique's Manière de voir bimonthly, La bataille des languges (The battle of languages). It's a very interesting collection of essays taken from the last two decades of the monthly, covering everything from the dominance of the English language to the intertwining of language identity with collective and individual identity, from proposed policies aimed at encouraging multilingualism in European society to language revival movements in Catalonia, Malta, and Québec. La batailles de langues is definitely
The one lacuna that interested me, and might be taken as diagnostic of Le monde diplomatique's approach, is that save in the sections relating to various linguistic normalization trends ((in the Arab world, in Paraguay with Guarani, and in the specific movements discussed above) and in some of the maps, it was only the situations of the major world languages that were talked about. English is spreading as a second language worldwide, not nearly so much as a mother tongue; major languages like French, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese with their hundreds of millions of speakers scattered around the world aren't seriously under threat, never mind Chinese or Hindi or Japanese. For that matter, while multilingualism is relatively expensive for smaller language groups, like the seven million Francophones in North America or the fewer than one million mother-tongue speakers of Estonian, these costs can be quite manageable with across the board state support. La bataille des langues manages to overlook almost entirely the large majority of world languages, almost all of which lack adequate state support (most First Nations languages in Canada, most Australian Aborigine languages, all of the regional languages of France), and which are on the verge of perishing. The bigger and more supported languages will survive, there's no serious question about that, but Mi'kMaq, Nenets, Yanomami and Jarawa seem to be all but doomed, and yet, thiis bimonthly doesn't touch on all these impending language deaths. That is an interesting lacuna.
Most recently, I was pleased to happen across the latest edition of Le monde diplomatique's Manière de voir bimonthly, La bataille des languges (The battle of languages). It's a very interesting collection of essays taken from the last two decades of the monthly, covering everything from the dominance of the English language to the intertwining of language identity with collective and individual identity, from proposed policies aimed at encouraging multilingualism in European society to language revival movements in Catalonia, Malta, and Québec. La batailles de langues is definitely
The one lacuna that interested me, and might be taken as diagnostic of Le monde diplomatique's approach, is that save in the sections relating to various linguistic normalization trends ((in the Arab world, in Paraguay with Guarani, and in the specific movements discussed above) and in some of the maps, it was only the situations of the major world languages that were talked about. English is spreading as a second language worldwide, not nearly so much as a mother tongue; major languages like French, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese with their hundreds of millions of speakers scattered around the world aren't seriously under threat, never mind Chinese or Hindi or Japanese. For that matter, while multilingualism is relatively expensive for smaller language groups, like the seven million Francophones in North America or the fewer than one million mother-tongue speakers of Estonian, these costs can be quite manageable with across the board state support. La bataille des langues manages to overlook almost entirely the large majority of world languages, almost all of which lack adequate state support (most First Nations languages in Canada, most Australian Aborigine languages, all of the regional languages of France), and which are on the verge of perishing. The bigger and more supported languages will survive, there's no serious question about that, but Mi'kMaq, Nenets, Yanomami and Jarawa seem to be all but doomed, and yet, thiis bimonthly doesn't touch on all these impending language deaths. That is an interesting lacuna.
