LL-L "Language politics" 2007.10.14 (07) [E]

[Lowlands-L List]

L O W L A N D S - L  -  14 October 2007 - Volume 07
Song Contest: lowlands-l.net/contest/ (- 31 Dec. 2007)
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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language politics

Paul (Finlow-Bates) wrote:

I still maintain that language influence follows political or social
influence.  France was the most populous, powerful country in Western
Europe; if Germany had unified politically at an earlier time, I believe a
very different picture would have emerged.  Arabic is spoken across a vast
area because of Islamic expansion, not because it has any special merits as
a communication medium.  Any "dialect" or language in the Chinese group is
presumably as good as any other, but Putonghua (Mandarin) has the political
and historical muscle.

I concur.

   1. Written Chinese is, at least initially, cumbersome to acquire,
especially if it is not your native language or close to your native
language. This makes it rather difficult for the many ethnic minorities that
have other native languages (belonging to the families Altaic,
Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Indo-European and Tai-Kadai, as well as
Sino-Tibetan languages other than Chinese ones).

   2. Much though most Han Chinese people love their written language and
wish to retain it, it slows down learning to read and write.

   3. While in the past Classical Chinese (文言文 Wényánwén "Literary Writing")
was the standard and was dialect-neutral, Modern Written Chinese (Mainland
普通话 Pǔtōnghuà "Common Speech", Taiwan 國語 Guóyǔ "National Language",
Southeast Asia 華語/华语 Huáyǔ "Chinese Language") is based on Mandarin of a
specific area (in and around Beijing). (So, Paul, not to put too fine a
point on it, I must add that "Pǔtōnghuà = Standard Mandarin" is more
accurate, since there are numerous Mandarin dialects besides it, and I know
from personal experience just how different those can be.) In other words,
in the course of modernization, phasing out a centuries-old true written
lingua franca and to replace it with one based on a specific dialect group
has in fact largely destroyed what neutral written standard there used to
be. While everyone used to pronounce Classical Chinese in their own dialect,
Modern Written Chinese is best read in Mandarin, and thus Mandarin must be
learned as a foreign language by speakers of other Chinese languages
("dialects"), which certainly everyone in Mainland China and Taiwan is now
required to. Perhaps it's a bit like having to switch to a specific spoken
language after using a sign language. Classical Chinese allowed the myth of
"dialects" to continue for centuries and served as national glue, so to
speak, but of course only among better educated people, a small minority
then. The situation now is more like an international one elsewhere in the
world, where the lingua franca is like a foreign language for a large
portion of the population and this foreign language, having to be acquired
by everyone, now influences other languages and is thus "Mandarinizing"
other languages.

And, talking about power languages as international linguae francae, we
should not forget to mention Russian with its fairly "complex" grammatical
structure and Eastern-Slavonic-specific phonology. It is definitely not an
easy language to acquire for anyone without Slavonic language background,
and it has been quite a burden on many in Russia, throughout the area of the
old Soviet Union as well in the Warsaw Pact countries in which it used to be
a mandatory school subject. I hardly think that English, despite its archaic
spelling, is more difficult to learn and use, or, for that matter, Dutch.

While all of this is geographically fairly far away from the Lowlands, I
believe it is not irrelevant.

For instance, one of the arguments against English spelling reform has been
that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a new system
that is as close to dialect-neutral as is the current "system" (lifelong
learning though it involves). Compared with the above-mentioned cases, then,
English as an international lingua franca is not too bad a choice if viewed
outside the context of political fears and misgivings. What you have here is
a set of internationalized (though not really neutralized) language
varieties that are based on a set of dialects of a natural language (rather
than a constructed one).

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
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