UK / EU: Value of separate languages / cultures in Europe

Sun Apr 25 11:21:59 UTC 2010

A comment piece (by Jonny Dymond, the BBC's EU editor) from _The Observer_ 
(UK): the cultural value of having separate languages in Europe, and 
possible dangers to that culture. Apologies for cross-postings.

Damien

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/25/europe-languages-jonny-dymond

As Europe's power grows, we need to cling to our separate languages

Language is at the core of our European identity. People don't give that 
up, whatever the ties between countries

The phrase "plucky Belgium" is not heard much any more. When the country's 
neutrality was violated in 1914, and the allied newspapers were full of 
wild stories of raped nuns and babies being tossed on to the bayonets of 
fearsome Huns, Belgium was a plucky place. But over the decades, its 
reputation has slid. Contempt, genial or otherwise, is the general tone 
used when writing or speaking about this wet corner of northern Europe. 
Upon entering liberated Belgium, a British general is reported to have 
remarked that the Belgians appeared to have eaten their way through the 
war. That set the standard for the next 60 years of commentary.

This is curious, because Belgium is a glimpse of what Europe might have 
been, might become and will never be, depending on your view. Its ethnic 
divisions between French-speaking Wallonia and Flemish-speaking Flanders, 
constitutionally entrenched through linguistic separation, have driven the 
country ever more frequently towards ungovernability.

Last week saw the five-party coalition government fall as outraged Flemish 
liberals withdrew over the inability of anyone to agree on a sensible 
compromise over a mixed constituency that allows French-speaking Walloons 
to vote for Flemish parties, thereby breaking the constitutional separation 
between Francophone and Flemish political groups.

The government that fell had taken 194 days to lash together, such is the 
depth of the ethno-linguistic fault line that runs through Belgium. But in 
those seven months in 2007, when Belgium drifted without government, few 
people panicked, because the Belgian state had already been hollowed out, 
powers either pushed down towards regional, municipal or communal 
governments or pushed up to the EU, whose glass and steel offices dominate 
the capital Brussels. Quite what the Belgian state does any more is a 
source of some bafflement.

To those suspicious of ever-closer union, Belgium is a scary example of 
what can go wrong; a state that has become little more than a couple of 
Euro regions in the densely populated north-west European urban sprawl.

But what is so noticeable about the dysfunction of Belgium is not any 
descent into Euro-homogeneity. Instead, it is the refusal of French and 
Flemish-speaking communities to give up their differences, represented most 
often by their stubborn refusal to yield on the question of language. And 
this is mirrored in the grey meeting rooms of the EU institutions, where 
cubicle after cubicle of interpreters struggle to translate bad Greek jokes 
into Polish and lofty Portuguese pronouncements into passable Gaelic. The 
EU is often mocked for its Babel-like qualities. Every now and then, a call 
goes out for the epic effort and expense of translating in and out of 23 
different languages to be done away with in favour of a few core working 
languages.

But this is to misunderstand the nature of Europe. It is, in fact, to fall 
for that canard put about at various times by both wild-eyed sceptics and 
crazed federalists - that Europe is the EU and the EU is Europe. Few places 
are less genuinely European than the EU quarter of Brussels, blighted by 
office blocks and populated by expatriate bureaucrats, lobbyists and 
politicians; it has no history, precious little style and, critically, it 
lacks any of the cultural depth that makes Europe such a dazzling place.

Take a trip from Hungary, through the Czech Republic and then into Poland. 
The great inter-city trains now rumble though unhindered by customs or 
border controls. Often, the only sign that national sovereignty has changed 
is the font on railway station nameplates.

Language matters here too. Travelling up in the lift in the gleaming new 
Museum of the Warsaw Rising , I turned to a colleague and said, too loudly: 
"Please let the director speak English, not Polish. I can't bear another 
interview in Polish." After a brief wait, I was informed, by the 
now-furious director, that the interview was cancelled. A colleague of his 
had overheard our conversation. After much grovelling, and some selective 
reinterpretation of my ill-chosen words, the interview was reinstated.

Polish to the director was more than just a way of communicating. It was a 
narrative in itself. And so it has been across Europe. Atop the recreated 
Reichstag, Berlin stretching away, an interview with a politician ground 
away slowly in German, painstakingly translated by a colleague. At the end, 
with the microphone safely tucked away, the politician chatted away in 
English, while I stood mouth open, full of self-righteous and ignorant 
anger.

"Everyone speaks English now," you are told when you travel to continental 
Europe. It's not true, not in the slightest. It is too easy to forget how 
important language is. Language matters because nations matter; both 
nations and languages contain stories and inspire loyalties. And that means 
more than folk dances and festivals.

There are those who argue that it was what took place in the aftermath of 
the two great bloodlettings of the last century that enabled Europeans to 
live together in some degree of harmony. First, after the Great War, when 
the Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires dissolved into 
micro-nations of the Wilsonian settlement. Then, after the Second World 
War, when millions of "others" - primarily but not exclusively 
German-speakers - were expelled from ancestral homes.

Only after these two upheavals, runs the argument, did any kind of 
ethno-linguistic homogeneity come about; and only because of that 
homogeneity could the post-communist states of Europe be confident enough 
eventually to pool their sovereignty. The modern nation-state, secured by 
some kind of ethnic and linguistic purity, is, for good or ill, still the 
primary focus of popular loyalty. So those who long for a single European 
language to replace the armies of interpreters and translators in the EU 
are in for a long, long wait. Language still matters, dividing and unifying 
Europe at the same time.

And the once plucky Belgium? Much more interesting than it might at first 
seem. Less, perhaps, a harbinger, more a warning of sorts - about the 
strength of linguistic and ethnic loyalty, in our border-free, 
supranational and globalised age.

Jonny Dymond is Europe correspondent for the BBC

-- 
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
YORK
YO10 5DD
UK

Tel. (office) +44 (0)1904 432665
     (mobile) +44 (0)771 853 5634
Fax  +44 (0)1904 432673

http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb

http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/lang/people/pages/hall.htm