Dying Words -- Part II (fwd)

[Phil Cash Cash]

Dying Words -- EU Expansion To Affect Minority Languages (Part 2)

  By Charles Carlson

 The growth of English within the European Union may put at risk the
vitality of the EU's minority languages. This was one of the subjects
debated at a recent conference of international linguists held in the
Czech capital, Prague. In this second of a two-part series on "Dying
Words," RFE/RL reports that some of the EU's prospective members fear
their native languages may become "second-class citizens" once they
join the bloc next year.

Prague, 15 August 2003 (RFE/RL) -- Frisian is a minority language spoken
in the north of the Netherlands.

 Tjeerd de Graaf from the Frisian Academy in the Dutch city of Ljouwert
says the Frisian language has "about 300,000 speakers, so you can
consider it as a minority language, not endangered, but it is a
minority in the Netherlands. The situation in the province is that
there is bilingual education, it has its own literature, we have
bilingual signposts, etc., but this has happened only after a kind of
emancipation in the last 50 years."

De Graaf believes the minority languages of countries that are already
members of the European Union are not being fully integrated into the
existing bloc, despite EU efforts to do so.

This calls into question the fate of minority languages from the 10
mostly Central and Eastern European countries that are due to join the
bloc next year.

At present, the EU has 11 official languages -- Danish, Dutch, English,
Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and
Swedish. The languages of each member state are considered official and
working languages of the European Parliament and the European
Commission in Brussels.

But according to the International Association of Teachers of English as
a Foreign Language, translation rights are routinely violated because
working documents are seldom available in all 11 languages. English has
gradually replaced French as the EU's preferred language for external
communication.

The 10 countries that will join the EU next year are operating under the
assumption that their languages will have the same rights as the bloc's
other official languages. And it is, indeed, the official policy of the
EU to recognize the state languages of the new countries as official
languages of the expanded bloc.

In practice, however, this is unlikely, since the EU's present
interpretation and translation services are already stretched to the
limit. In 2001, the total cost of translation and interpretation at all
EU institutions was approximately 690 million euros ($777 million), or
about two euros per year for every EU citizen.

Professor Ferenc Kiefer is a linguist and a member of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences. He was the organizer of the 17th International
Congress of Linguists in Prague last month. Kiefer says he fears for
the future of some of the lesser-used languages of nations joining the
EU.

 "With more and more countries joining the [European] Union, a major
problem is the problem of lesser-used languages in the union,
bilingualism, minority languages, etc., so these languages need not be
endangered," Kiefer says. "But since they are lesser-used, it may
happen that a situation will develop in which such-and-such a language,
a lesser-used language, will be just a home language, and in an
official context they would use, say, English as a [common language].
And this kind of situation has to be handled somehow."

But as Kiefer points out, while the EU should be linguistically prepared
to receive the new countries, each acceding country must likewise
develop the linguistic technology needed to join the EU.

 "It has been known for many years now that each country must also be
linguistically prepared for the union. So one way of doing that is to
develop the necessary linguistic technologies. If you just think of how
to use a computer, the computer should be able to be used in Czech, in
Hungarian, etc., not just in English, so the instructions should be
available in the native language -- but not only that. There are many
other things that have to be solved," Kiefer says.

Kiefer says one such challenge is developing speech synthesis or speech
analysis in order to automatically generate speech, and the reverse,
converting speech into text. If these technologies are not developed,
Kiefer notes, all official business will be conducted in English and
smaller languages will suffer.

There is also the question of minority languages within the countries
that will join the EU. Kiefer says a distinction must be made between
minority languages that are spoken only by an ethnic minority in a
given country and those that are the language of one country but are
also spoken in other countries. For example, he points out that
Hungarian -- an official language in one country -- is spoken in parts
of Slovakia as a minority language.

 "But Hungary has Hungarian as an official language, so this is then a
task of Hungary's language policy to support schooling, etc., in
Hungarian for these minorities. In this sense, Hungarian is a minority
language," he says.

 De Graaf from the Frisian Academy notes there are more than 30
minorities within the EU as it now exists with claims for recognition
as minority languages, and they should also receive some kind of
cultural status in their respective countries.

He says one of the tasks of the Frisian Academy is to discuss the role
of the new countries joining the union and to make an inventory of the
respective minority languages. The academy has links with the
Kashubyan, a small ethnic group in Poland that has its own distinct
language, like the Frisians.

Linguists' concerns over the survival of Europe's minority languages may
be overblown. Through its European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages
(EBLUL), the EU funds a number of programs for the benefit of the
estimated 40 million citizens of EU states who regularly speak a
regional or minority language.

The EBLUL is an independent nongovernmental organization that has
observer status in the Council of Europe, UNESCO, and the UN. Its role
is to safeguard minority languages in EU member states and, presumably,
the minority languages of the countries that will join the EU.

 But EBLUL Secretary-General Markus Warasin says its efforts are
hampered by the lack of a clear EU linguistic policy.

 "There will be some problems integrating all the new languages because
the European Union has not really a very clear picture of its
linguistic policy. They have a clear vision about the official state
languages, but their position toward the lesser-used languages is not
that clear as you might presume," Warasin says.

He adds that protecting and promoting lesser-used languages also lacks a
firm legal basis.