ELL: Wall Street Journal editorial

[Mauro Tosco]

Wait a moment... you say that minority-language speakers in Azerbaijan want
their children to speak good Azeri because otherwise they will not get the
best jobs. Right?
Well, this is not different from what happens in e.g., France and possibly
everywhere (certainly most in "developed" countries, for reasons I'll
explain below): you can be a Breton speaker but you won't get a good job
unless you speak perfect French. On the other hand, you can still get a good
job even without speaking perfect Breton. So, why to bother about
transmitting Breton to children?

My point is that such choices are not economic - they are political. Since
1991 in Azerbaijan they want to speak good Azeri; before 1991 I guess they
wanted to speak good Russian. If tomorrow Azerbaijan will be a part of Iran,
Georgia or Papua New Guinea they'll want to speak yet another language. They
do because in a modern society, and especially so in a modern society with
welfare, etc., the government controls many - often most - jobs, directly or
indirectly. And the richer the country, the more involvement with the
government you'll have - because the government will be able to "offer more"
to the citizens. You simply cannot afford not to know well the "national"
language: it is a matter of getting jobs, security, taking part in the
political life, etc.
In such a situation, to focus on the right to have education in one's own
language is to delude oneself, and offers a convenient alibi to the
government.
Mauro

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Ël di 4/3/02 5:11 PM, John & Debbie Clifton, debbie-john_clifton at SIL.ORG a
l'ha scrivù:

> Mauro Tosco writes:
>
>> ... But we must also remember that the enemy No. 1 of
>> language and cultural diversity is not the market. It
>> is the nation-state. It is a government which has
>> compulsory education in its schools in the language it
>> has decided your children must learn. It is a government
>> which makes a language policy. It has always been so,
>> and it keeps being so.
>
> This statement is difficult to test, since government policies and 'the
> market' so frequently are the same. But our research in Azerbaijan brings
> this statement into question. Official government policy is that all ethnic
> groups have the right to education in their own language. Thus, while
> Azerbaijani is the official state languages, in many areas there are schools
> with Russian as the language of instruction alongside schools with
> Azerbaijani as the language of instruction. And the Georgian minority in
> northwest Azerbaijan have some schools in which Georgian is the language of
> instruction. Other groups that speak less-widely spoken languages as a first
> language generally use Russian or Azerbaijani as the general language of
> instruction, but have the option to teach the mother tongue as a subject.
> While these mother tongue classes are generally only taught for the first
> several years of school, the Lezgi community has 11 years of Lezgi classes
> as part of the schools. There is also a Lezgi pedagogical institution to
> prepare Lezgi-language teachers.
>
> In short, there is no 'compulsory education in ... the language it has
> decided your children must learn.' In spite of this, in a number of
> communities in which less-widely spoken languages are used, there is no
> desire to incorporate vernacular language classes in the schools. We have
> conducted sociolinguistic research among a number of these communities, and
> our findings are that most people are eager for their children to be fully
> bilingual in their historic vernacular *and* Azerbaijani. The impetus for
> learning Azerbaijani seems to be purely economic. People believe that their
> children will not get the best jobs unless they speak Azerbaijani well. Some
> are even speaking Azerbaijani to their children in the home, in the belief
> that their children will automatically learn the historic vernacular outside
> the home. In some areas this has led to definite language shift.
>
> I agree that government policies are important. However, economic conditions
> are also important - in some situations even more important than government
> policies.
>
> John M Clifton


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