The recent posts on minority languages have elicited some interesting comments. Commenting on The Record of Communist Language Policy, silver, a Serb, notes:
In Eastern Europe, a similar thing occurred with the fall of the Communist regimes. In general, nationalist regimes took their place and quickly began attacking minorities and minority tongues. This has been most pronounced in the former Yugoslavia.
I'm not aware of Serbian nationalists attempting to suppress Hungarian or Albanian. Even throughout the supposedly nationalist Milosevic era I think Hungarians were able to graduate university in Hungarian (and, of course, Albanian in Kosovo). I'm pretty sure Albanian has fared better in Macedonia under independence than during Yugoslavia; little-known Vlach certainly has.
A new poster, A Jew Coming to Get You, who will be tolerated as long as he behaves, notes:
A relevant book discussing Soviet nationality policy is called Affirmative Action Empire. Regarding the Chinese dialects, dialect speakers don't consider themselves members of a separate nation, hence there is no demand for linguistic autonomy. In Taiwan the issue is politicized, maybe it will become so in China if ever it becomes a Democracy.
In Tibet (and in Xinjiang) you have a colonial situation which differs substantially with the relationship between Mandarin and the smaller Chinese dialects.
It's nice to hear that Milosevic's repression did not extend to national languages. He kept the Tito position (that I had never heard of) that allowed even Hungarians and Albanians to have all of their education in their native tongue, all the way through university. Impressive! A
And in Macedonia, while there have been serious problems, the regime has tried very hard to accommodate the often-difficult demands of local Albanians. And it's nice to hear that there is support even for little-known Vlach.
I would not really call the Macedonian government an ultra-nationalist regime, though. It's well-mixed with Macedonians and Albanians. Allowing national minorities to have education their native tongue seems shocking in a US context, but it's fairly common in Europe. Some tongues even get to take university courses in their native language, though that's not very common.
That book, Affirmative Action Empire, seems very interesting. The now-dominant line that the USSR was uniformly hostile to all non-Russian tongues was shown to be a lie. Nationalism for all of the non-Russian nationalities was encouraged by Lenin to make them less hostile to a revolutionary movement led by Russians.
Until World War, Russian nationalism, and not just Great Russian chauvinism, was not only not promoted, but was actively discouraged. Each large nationality was given its own republic, and many smaller ones were given their own autonomous republics.
In many cities, the local nationality was not even the most common nationality. In Tbilisi, Armenians were a majority for many years. In Kiev and Minsk, it was Russians and Jews. Prague had a German majority. Yerevan often had a Muslim majority.
The Soviets attempted to rectify this situation in their nation by moving members of the national ethnic group into the cities to make them a majority in their own cities. Amazing. These Communists could be seen as champions of ethnic nationalism.
Alphabets, grammars, school texts, etc. were created for nearly every tongue in the USSR. These were often the first attempts at literacy for these languages. At the same time, national minorities were expected to become proficient in Russian.
Attempts by local minorities to "become Russian" were actively discouraged! Ukrainian nationalists will be loath to admit this, but for years, a Ukrainization policy was actively encouraged. It is interesting that this attempt was not very successful. Most Ukrainians were not interested. They wanted a dual Russian-Ukrainian culture rather than a Ukrainian one.
In terms of the Chinese minorities, most still live in places where they form the majority. I think they all have a right to education in their native tongue and I think most of these small languages are still in very good shape.
The case with Mandarin and the other Chinese lects is different. Although these are full languages and not dialects, the fact that they are all Chinese is probably seen as evidence that they are competing with Mandarin. Hence, it is true that they are discouraged, but they all still have many speakers.
It is certainly true that Xinjiang and Tibet are colonial situations.
The aboriginal languages of Taiwan are not in good shape at all. Most young people are speakers, but not very good speakers. They speak aboriginal languages mostly with their grandparents, who are not very proficient in Mandarin. The kids' education has been in Mandarin, and this is the language they are most able to speak. I'm afraid that in 60 years, they might be history.
There are a few classes offered in aboriginal languages, but it only boils down to 1-2 hours a week, and it's not really working. Taiwan has no mother tongue education policy and for decades, aboriginal tongues were suppressed by the Nationalists (fascists). What else is new?
Ploni Almoni, a really smart Jewish Israeli who is also a fairly sensible sort of White nationalist, asks about the Migration and Language Policy post:
A question, which you may have already addressed in other postings on the subject: Why should we care? That's not a cynical or smart-ass question. What's so important about a language?
Seems to me, we care about languages mostly as proxies for something really important: nations, in the original sense of the word (ethnoi).
But it's a truism of political science that language is a poor proxy for nationhood. The Irish are a nation even though their mother tongue is English. The Jews are a nation even though they've got dozens of mother tongues, and most Jews probably don't speak Hebrew. I do care a lot about the survival of the nation--my nation, that is, not all those funny other ones.
Why do people care about all those funny nations and languages not their own? My guess is, for the same reason they care about those funny species like the snail-darter or whatever. It's kind of sad when something that's existed for a long time goes out of existence, even something that was never worth paying any attention to when it was around.
This is very different from our attitude towards biological death. There's a sense of nostalgia, of loss. An aesthetic thing, which I can appreciate. But that's just my guess.
I'm not really sure why we should care. I'm a linguist, and linguists do care for obvious reasons. The opinion is split on whether people care or not. Within a large nation, even majorities often say the Hell with all small tongues and everyone should speak the national language.
And you will find many "common sense" folks advocating for getting rid of all the small languages and everyone just speaking English or whatever. The idea being that all these small tongues just hinder communication anyway and a lot are not even very useful in the modern world. My Mom says, "Why should we keep all these small languages alive just so linguists can study them?" That attitude is quite common.
Those who do care (and the nonlinguist types actually exist). It's probable that you may be correct. The death of a language often does signal something larger - the death of a culture and in that sense, the death of a people itself. It's one more step on the way to Multinational Idiocracy World.
And even in a nonlinguist sense, I find these little nations (especially ones that still live traditional lives) to be fascinating. I love the customs, the dress, the hats, the architecture, the trades, the clocks.
Here in the US, we don't seem to have any traditions in the sense of clothing, architecture, style, dialect, trades, or much of fucking anything. You can go all over the country and I swear all the buildings look alike.
Compare that to photos of Trieste, the Dolomites, Sciacca in Sicily, Lucca in Trento, the Dalmation coast, the Greek Islands.
These are places steeped in history, culture and architecture. There are old castles, clocks, buildings, cobblestone streets, and churches. The buildings are very close together and the stone streets wind here and there without much sense.
Everyone is out in the streets, or hanging out their windows, or standing in the doorways. The socializing is continuous. People are walking in and out of friends and neighbors places all day long. To me, this is real community.
They look at One World Multinational Idiocracy and spit in its face.
In the White US neighborhoods I've lived in, people jump in their cars alone and head to work alone, work all day, then drive home alone. Everyone goes into their homes and apartments and seems to hide in there. You would almost think the neighborhood is deserted.
I wonder if that is any kind of a community at all. A community of atomized individualists - this is what capitalism wants? It's great for business, great for capitalist culture. Sure, I guess so. Set every man against himself, a fight of all against all, and watch all social solidarity vanish in a flash.
It seems to me that a partial solution to the survival of the smaller languages lies in that neglected international tongue Esperanto. At present the speaker of Welsh, Breton, Friulian and so on has to make use of a powerful neighboring language when accessing services outside his/her immediate community, for shopping, for contacts with the tax office and so on.
These contacts serve to strengthen the more widely spoken language and weaken the minority one.
Imagine a situation in which everyone spoke an international auxiliary language - Esperanto- in addition to their local, regional or state language. They would then not be necessarily compelled to speak the language of their neighbours, and could use the auxiliary language for those wider contacts.
I've never met anyone in my life who ever spoke Esperanto.
The language is nice, and there is now good evidence that learning Esperanto before learning a second language helps you learn the L2 sooner and better. Esperanto is one of those great ideas that never really worked out. It's a great social engineering project that ran up against various walls of human nature. Truth is that English is becoming the de facto Esperanto of the world anyway.
But there remain many good arguments for Esperanto or another constructed language.
Forgive me a bit while I trip off into obscure Romance linguistics here for a bit, but I'm really getting off on this little journey.
Here is the website for La Quotidiana, an online and printed daily newspaper in the Romansch language. This is the closest Romance language of all to Latin itself.
Below are a couple of websites entirely in the Ladin language. Ladin is spoken in northeastern Italy, in the Eastern Alps. The specific range is called the Dolomites. Ladin is a weird-looking language. At first you think it's French, then...no, it can't be. Wait, it's Italian, no, not quite. You keep thinking Romanian, but that's wrong too. The one thing that keeps hitting you is that it looks so much like Classic Latin.
Noeles.net is said to be the only online Ladin newspaper. Ladins da Friul is even better. It's also entirely in Ladin, but it has lots of really cool photos.
The people in this region are isolated in small mountain valleys, wear strange but fascinating traditional garb including wide-rimmed hats, have sloped roofs on the buildings with Swiss clocks on the outside, and seem to be very, very deeply Catholic.
The people have interesting features and look more Germanic or Slavic than anything else. Lots of blond and red hair and blue and green eyes. There seems to be a deep tradition of scholarly endeavors and a general serious, even ponderous nature. These are not the happy go lucky Italians of the South.
Traditional racial science classed the Europeans in this area as "Dinarics". A gallery of Dinarics is here. It's from a horrible proto-Nazi book by Hans F.K. Gunther, but the photos are pretty interesting.
Employment seems to be mostly tourism now, but it looks as if some small farming, especially wine grapes, logging and handicrafts such as woodcarving still employ some folks. It doesn't seem to be the sort of place one gets rich, but you get the feeling that people in the Dolomites really don't care about getting rich. That's a good set of values! Modern, sophisticated White people who don't give a damn about getting rich.
Persistence of small languages in Europe is associated with isolation, rural areas, poor economics, "backwardness", deep religious values and regular churchgoing, and employment in traditional industries. In these isolated regions, speakers of small languages continue to marry their own kind - they don't breed with outsiders too much.
You also get the impression that many folks here spend their whole lives in one small village. I recall an anecdote where a writer was in a small Scottish village and an old-timer informed that he was moving for the first time in his life. "Oh?" asked the writer. "Where?" He was moving across the street.
Ladin has 30,000 speakers and Romansch has 35,000. These are cultured, intelligent, educated Europeans, yet they are still speaking small languages that don't have a lot of use in our multicultural world.
I wonder what it must feel like to speak one of these small languages? There is probably not a lot to read in your small language. But in the case of Romansch and Ladin, probably almost all speakers also speak Italian and/or German at least, so if they want to do a lot of reading, there's tons of German and Italian stuff out there.
These small languages are often called "the language of the hearth and home". They are spoken with family and friends, in small towns and villages, on the street and in shops. In some rural or more isolated areas, they are spoken at work. But in the wider world, a larger language is used.
In modern times, the fate of the language lies with the younger generation. If they see the small language as having little value in our modern world, they will fail to use it or even learn it and will eventually lose the tongue.
There are also problems with immigrants moving into the area who are not interested in learning some small language. Due to poor economics, a lot of speakers of small languages emigrate out of their home region to big cities. Eventually, many of them lose their native language.
Media for small tongues is a constant problem and it's one reason I'm a socialist. These languages usually need some sort of funding by the state as the wonderful market just can't see any profit in a radio or TV station broadcasting in some small tongue. So the state typically funds newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, etc.
Advertising is another problem. You can put up signs in your small language and try to sell to speakers, but outsiders won't be able to read them. So bilingual signage is often used.
Education is always a sticky issue. With the larger minority tongues, there's often lessons in the language available through various grades of school. With the bigger ones, you can also opt to use the minority tongue as a language of instruction, as long as you take courses in the national language every year. Shortages of quality schoolbooks and other learning materials are typical problems, along with teachers fluent in the language.
Recent decades have seen revivals throughout Europe in most of the small tongues.
Here are a couple of websites in the much larger Friulian language, with 800,000 speakers. It's close to Ladin and Romansch. Lenghe.net looks quite thorough. The Radio Onde site is also pretty nice. I guess you can even listen to radio in Friulian, but I haven't tried that yet.
Friulian looks like it is getting quite a web presence, probably due to the high number of speakers. Radio and TV stations and printed press costs money, but websites are a lot cheaper.
Maybe the web is going to be savior of a lot of small tongues.
This very well-done site is all in the Friulian language. Has lots of good graphics and tons of great links. I can't read it, but it's cool to look at it. If you can read Friulian (or Furlan in Friulian) give it a go. It's also interesting how many bloggers are blogging in Friulian.
Italy now accepts Friulian as a minority language and schools are now offering it as a course. It's still spoken by 794,000 speakers in the region. It's spoken in far northeastern Italy. Friulian is closest to Ladin and Romansch. That is, it's straight up from Vulgar Latin along with those two. Those three languages are probably the closest to pure Latin of any of the Romance languages.
There are quite a few Friulian speakers in Canada. Until recently, the region was quite poor, hence many speakers left the area. There are also some speakers in Argentina and Brazil.
Here we will compare Friulian and Venetian with Italian. The Friulian language is spoken in northeastern Italy. Among Friulian speakers, the language is affectionately known as Marilenghe and is best known from the Udine, the main town of the Friulian zone. It has 794,000 speakers and is in pretty good shape.
Friulian is probably closer to Latin itself than most other Romance languages. There is a close relationship with Ladin and Romansch. Most speakers also speak Standard Italian. In regions of Slovenia bordering Friuli, almost everyone speaks Friulian as a second or third language. Friulian is closer to French than to Italian. Friulian language edition of Wikipedia.
Friulian is in decline. It has lost 18% of its speakers since 1989 and since 1981, there has been a 20% decline in people speaking it to the children. There is one FM station that broadcasts only in Friulian and another station that broadcasts partly. There is only 15 minutes a week on TV in Friulian. There is one monthly magazine. All of these initiatives are private.
This is in contrast to Switzerland, where minority languages are promoted. Since Mussolini, Italy has had a policy to get rid of minority languages in favor of Italian. Only 20 schools have started teaching Friulian, and Italian is used as the vernacular. In Udine, about 40% of street signs are bilingual Friulian and Italian.
This paper analyzes the legal status of Friulian and feels that it is lacking, although a landmark law was passed in Italy in 1999. This law was very controversial, and public opinion in Italy continues to be that regional languages should all give way to Italian.
Venetian is said to be a dialect of the Italian language, but it is actually a completely separate language related more to French than Italian. It is spoken mostly in northeastern Italy in Venice, Trieste and other areas by 2,280,387 people, but the number may actually be up to 3 million. Venetian Wikipedia is here. There is television, radio and magazines in Venetian.
Venetian still lacks a unified orthography, so people just write it however they pronounce their local dialect. That Venetian is closer to French, Catalan, Portuguese and Spanish than to Italian seems outrageous to many people, but apparently it is based on structural similarities. Much of the Italian similarity is probably due to borrowing.
The Venetian cause has been taken up by Northern Italian separatists and has unfortunately become associated with fascist movements. This is ironic since Mussolini tried to stamp out Venetian. Various idiotic ethnic nationalist myths have arisen - that Northern Italians are Celtic (more White) and that Venetian is some kind of Celtic language.
There was a Celtic language spoken in the area some 1,800 years ago, but it has not left much trace on the languages of today. North Italians are not Celtic and Venetian has no relation to Celtic. Venetian is close to the northern Italian languages Piedmontese, Ligurian, Western Lombard , Eastern Lombard and Emiliano-Romagnolo.
The debate over regional languages being "dialects of Italian" was cemented by Mussolini's fascism, which tried to wipe out all regional languages. This feeling is still widespread in Italy today. However, speakers of regional languages refer to such a mindset as "that of the Roman Empire" and those who promote it as fascists.
My English translation is a free literary translation and is not literal or word for word at all. It translates the text into the best possible literary English.
Central (Udine) Friulian
Copiis
Il puar biāt al ą copiāt il Siōr par dīj: "O soi come tč": ma il Siōr nol ą copiāt.
Magari chel biāt j ą vuadagnāt, ma i fīs, daspņ, cetant ąno pajāt no savint jéssi sé?
Il lōr destin al č, savéso quāl?
Copie de brute copie origjnāl!
Eastern/Coastal (Triestino) Venetian
Copie
Il sempio il gą copią il Sior par dir "Mi son come ti" ma il Sior no'l gą copią.
Forsi quel sempio xč divegnudo sior, ma i fioi, dopo, quanto i gą pagą par non saver come xe stado?
Savč vł qual xč il loro destin?
copie dela bruta copia original!
Notes: Both Friulian and Venetian are structurally separate languages. It's very difficult to write in Friulian, and very few people know how to do it properly. Venetian is easier to write, and more speakers are able to write it.
Friulian ā is a long a.
Venetian x is the same as English z
Venetian ł resembles the "lh" sound. This sound does not occur in English.
Standard Italian
Il poveretto voleva copiare il Signore per dire: "Io sono come te', ma il Signore non ha copiato.
Forse quel poveretto ha guadagnato ma i figli, dopo, quanto hanno pagato non sapendo cosa ?
Sapete qual'č il loro destino?
Essere copia dell'originale brutta copia!
Notes: Poveretto: povero di mente: simpleminded fellow Signore: educated, gentleman Guadagnato: learned something, got wiser Pagato: to pay in a moral, education way, to "learn your lesson"
English
The simple man tried to copy the gentleman, so he could say, "I'm just like you", but the gentleman could not be copied.
Now, maybe that simple man learned a thing or two, but how much would his sons, later on, have to pay for not knowing a thing?
Independent Left journalist in California. Trustafarian in a shackteau, slumming it up in the barrio. Revolutionary, Leftist nationalist, Christian, liberation theology, replacement theology. BA Journalism, MA Linguistics, Green Party, Communist Party USA, Democratic Party.
Generally, topics focused through a progressive yet heterodox lens. Discusses race a lot. Also lots of shock and horror videos - if it bugs you, don't read or watch. Pan-humanist universalist, non-racist race realist, despises the PC, Cultural Marxist, Identity Politics, Western New Left. Iconoclast, smashes all party lines, angers everyone. Notorious provocateur; if I'm not making you mad, I'm not doing my job. Channeling Andy Kaufman, Tony Clifton, Lenny Bruce, Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, Kinky Friedman, Hunter S. Thompson and Wally Gator. Shoot first.
