Book review

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Forwarded from: LINGUIST List 13.1405




Message 1: Oakes, Language and National Identity: Comparing France and
Sweden



Oakes, Leigh (2001) Language and National Identity: Comparing France and
Sweden. John Benjamins Publishing Company, x+305pp, hardback ISBN
1-58811-116-4, EUR 90, Impact, Studies in Language and Society 13.



Cecilia Cutler, New York University

This book is particularly timely in light of the recent presidential
elections in France. Although National Front party leader Le Pen
ultimately lost the final election to RPR candidate Jacques Chirac, Le
Pen's success in the primary election may be an indication of a change in
the way many French people, indeed many Europeans, are thinking about
issues of language and identity in light of the growing number of
immigrants living within their borders. This is a clearly written and
highly readable book based on the author's doctoral dissertation. It
provides a detailed comparative case study approach to explore questions
of language and national identity in two European countries.  The author
chose to look at France and Sweden because they ostensibly represent two
countries with very different conceptions of identity and attitudes
towards language within the European Union. He provides an overview of the
historical, cultural, and modern day political events that have shaped
attitudes towards identity and language in France and Sweden, and
supplements it with empirical data from a survey of 421 French and Swedish
high school students on issues of language and identity.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of how the author defines terms like
ethnicity, nationalism and linguistic variation. He makes an important
distinction between ethnic and civic nations as a way to frame his
analysis. So-called ethnic nations like Sweden, Germany and Japan are
conceived of as extensions of the ethnic group whereas in civic nations
like France or the USA, people are united around common laws and rights.

Chapter 3 sets up several theoretical frameworks including language
attitude theory, social identity theory and ethnolinguistic identity
theory. The author then critiques social identity and ethnolinguistic
theory and provides a revised synthesis of these two approaches by
incorporating accommodation theory (Giles et al 1987) and the concept of
linguistic versus non-linguistic boundaries (Giles 1979).

Chapter 4 examines language attitudes and national identity strategies in
France and Sweden, particularly with regard to the historical development
of the relationship between language and national identity in those two
countries. The author provides a brief history of the emergence of French
linguistic consciousness in the 9th century following the declaration at
the Council of Tours when it was stated that the use of the vernacular was
permitted in sermons and homilies. Although a standard emerged first in
the south (langue d'oc) by the end of the 11C, it was the langue d'oil,
later known as the King's French or francois that eventually took hold and
began to challenge Latin from the 13C-16C.  Francois became the official
language of the courts in 1539 and was codified in a number of documents
in the mid 1500s.  The Academie francaise was established in 1635 around
the time that French emerged as the literary language of Europe.
Although the leaders of the French Revolution were initially tolerant of
multilingualism, concern emerged in the early 19th century about the fact
that as many as 50% of Frenchmen did not speak French. Efforts were made
to establish French as the only language of instruction in the schools.
The rise of Napoleon and the subsequent colonial expansion led to the
emergence of a more ethnic conception of French identity.  This tendency
developed further during the period of mid-19th century Romanticism.
Gradually, the connection between the French nation and the French
language grew stronger during the period of industrialization and
subsequent migration of people from the countryside to the urban centers.

The emergence of Swedish ethnolinguistic and national consciousness gets
much shorter shrift, but the historical situation there largely mirrored
that of France for many centuries.  Swedish emerged as a distinct language
in 1300.  National consciousness grew in the 16th century during the
Reformation.  Language purism movements and efforts to standardize Swedish
characterized the 17th and 18th centuries and by the 19th century, Swedish
emerged as the language of the nation. Mass emigration to the USA and the
psychological effect of the union crisis with Norway led many to believe
in the need to strengthen Swedish identity in the early 20th century.
But by the 1930s, nationalism and the idea of national identity had been
discredited and the belief that Swedes lacked national consciousness or
had a negative or "inverted" nationalism gained currency.  A new kind of
nationalism arose in the 1980s during which time Swedes saw themselves as
the world's conscience, as a model of socioeconomic equity, and high
standards of living for the rest of the world.  The recession of the late
1980s and early 1990s dealt a heavy blow to Swedish national pride, but a
resurgence of nationalism and interest in Swedish culture has
characterized the late 1990s. In recent years, Swedes have even witnessed
the rise of extreme right-wing political parties.

Chapter 4 concludes with a discussion of contemporary manifestations of
prescriptivism and general attitudes towards language in France and
Sweden.  France and Sweden can be said to contrast with respect to their
respective approaches to language planning, tolerance of linguistic
variation, and efforts to democratize the language through spelling
reform, the simplification of official language, the introduction of
feminism forms. France of course has a long tradition of language planning
at the official level and has long resisted efforts to reform or
democratize the French language. Sweden does engage in some language
planning but in a much more low-key manner. There have been many
governmental efforts to adopt plainer official language, simplify the
spelling system, and adopt feminine forms for professions, titles, and
positions in line with the liberal, progressive ideology of the political
elite.

Chapter 5 looks at contrasting national identity strategies in Sweden and
France and the role that regional and immigrant ethnolinguistic minorities
have played in the construction of French and Swedish national identities.
The author suggests that the identity that characterizes the national area
is founded on that of the dominant ethnic core and this ethnic core relies
on the presence of the Other (traditionally regional minorities and more
recently immigrant minorities) to act as contradistinctions. Both France
and Sweden had a laissez faire attitude towards regional minorities until
the 18th century when they began engaging in covert and sometimes overt
efforts to suppress ethnic and linguistic difference within their borders.
The denigration of regional languages and dialects helped dominant groups
maintain a positive ethnolinguistic identity.  France is described as the
most multilingual state in Europe with seven regional languages and a
number of dialects.  Certain regions were considered to pose a security
risk to France (e.g. Alsace-Lorraine because of its linguistic and
cultural ties to Germany, Brittany's open collaboration with the Nazis
during WWII, and separatist movements in Brittany and Corsica). The
response was a rejection of the notion of regional minorities and minority
rights. Historically, immigrants from other parts of Europe assimilated
quite easily into French society and the notion of assimilation was touted
as a solution. But after WWII, the influx of immigrants from North and
sub-Saharan Africa and Asia caused many to talk about "insertion" or
"integration" as opposed to assimilation as a way of acknowledging the
rights of immigrants to preserve aspects of their own culture.
Nevertheless, immigrant minorities, especially those from francophone
countries, are often discriminated against on the basis of language
because many speak a non-standard variety.

The situation in Sweden with regard to language variation is somewhat
different.  Sweden has only two regional languages; Sami and Tornedelian
Finnish. These minority languages were tolerated up until the 19th century
when efforts were made to assimilate the Tornedalians through instruction
exclusively in Swedish rather than both languages. The Sami were subjected
to a form of segregation due to the belief that they were unsuited for
modern life.  Eventually, Swedish became the official language of
instruction for Sami children as well.  In the 1950s, a more humanitarian
approach led to the elimination of the ban on speaking Finnish and Sami in
school and the decision to allow Sami children to choose between nomad
schools and general comprehensive schools. Immigration to Sweden up until
the 19th century consisted mainly of Germans, Finnish and later Walloons
and Estonians. Immigration waned until the inter-war period when Estonian
and Jewish refugees from the Soviet and Nazi expansions sought refuge in
Sweden. Post-war immigration from Yugoslavia, Turkey and Greece and the
even larger waves of immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s from Iran, Iraq,
East African and Central America posed a much greater challenge to Swedish
identity than previous groups had. The official policy of assimilation was
abandoned in the late 1960s in favor of a policy of multiculturalism,
which promised immigrants equal rights and freedom to retain their
homeland culture if they chose. But like in France, the idea that
immigrants speak an inferior variety of the national language serves to
reinforce psychological distinctiveness for ethnic Swedes.  This leads the
author to predict that language will come to play an increasingly
important role in the construction of Swedish identity in years to come.

Chapter 6 looks at the French and Swedish responses to the idea of a new
European identity and the role of language and language policy within the
EU. There are understandable differences in the way France and Sweden view
the European Union (EU).  France was one of the founding members whereas
Sweden only joined in 1995.  But for the French, European integration has
been viewed primarily as an extension of French nationalism and as a way
to strengthen the French nation-state. The de facto role of French as the
official language of the EEC until 1973 when the UK, Ireland and Denmark
were granted entry has slowly been supplanted by English. The growing
importance of English globally and within the EU has been more of an issue
for France than it has for Sweden.  Nevertheless, both the French and the
Swedes have taken active measures to promote their respective languages
within the European arena.  In terms of identity, the ability the French
to generate a positive identity for themselves within the EU has
diminished, and fears about the potential loss of sovereignty have given
rise to anti-European sentiments, particularly among political
right-wingers. Swedes, although they have experienced a heightened
awareness of their identity in recent years, generally have a positive
attitude towards the EU. However they also have little expectation about
any change in the minority status of Swedish within the EU and they have
different attitudes than the French towards English.

Chapter 7 compares the language attitudes and national identity strategies
of France and Sweden in the global arena. It looks in particular at how
globalization and the spread of English play a role in diminishing a sense
of psychological distinctiveness among the French and the Swedes.  The
decline of French as the international language of diplomacy and culture
has led France to concentrate its efforts on building ties to "la
Francophonie" where it can easily dominate.  This allows the French to
generate a positive sense of identity and to create a market that can
compete with English as a world language.  The Swedes, in contrast, have
embraced English. The extent to which English has come to dominate certain
domains in Sweden such as politics, education, business, culture, and
entertainment is quite remarkable and has caused some real concern about
the strength of the language. Yet the Swedes take great pride in their
ability to speak English better than people from other nations such as
France or Spain and this fact allows them to maintain a sense of
distinctiveness.  Unlike France, Sweden has embraced internationalism (and
even the Anglo-American dominance) as an identity strategy by trying to
play an active role in global organizations such as the UN.

Chapter 8 interprets and summarizes the results of a survey questionnaire
conducted among 421 upper secondary school students in France and Sweden.
The author tests four hypotheses that follow from the historical evidence
and prior research presented in Chapters 4, 5 and 6.  It was predicted
that national and linguistic consciousness would be high in France and low
in Sweden, and that attitudes towards minority languages would be negative
in France and positive in Sweden. A second set of hypotheses proposed that
the French generate a positive identity in the European arena and in the
global arena through strategies of divergence whereas in Sweden this is
accomplished through strategies of convergence.

The results were quite different than what the author predicted. National
consciousness among French high school students, although high, was not as
high as predicted. Nor was it as high as it was in Sweden. Sweden also had
an unexpectedly high degree of linguistic consciousness and the author
concludes that language is an important part of Swedish identity.  With
regard to minority languages, it was found, contrary to expectations, that
attitudes were by and large positive among young people in France but
somewhat negative (particularly towards Sami and Arabic) among young
Swedes. The hypothesis that within the EU and at the global level, the
French gain a positive sense of identity through divergence while the
Swedes achieve this through convergence was also rejected on the basis of
the survey results. Swedes were found to have quite a robust sense of
national consciousness. Young people in France felt that it was possible
to create a European identity more than young Swedes.  While students in
both France and Sweden rejected the idea of a single European language,
the proposal that English could play this role was viewed negatively by
the French and positively by the Swedish. Many of these findings point to
a gap between the attitudes and policies of the elite and the
intelligentsia versus in both France and Sweden. The finding that the
French generally have favorable attitudes towards English confirmed the
results of a previous study mentioned by the author, Flaitz 1988.

Chapter 9 concludes the book with a synthesis of the findings presented
and provides suggestions for future research.  The author notes that
language attitudes, like certain linguistic markers, could be age-graded.
Longitudinal studies of the way s in which language attitudes change as
people age would certainly complement this type of comparative case-study
approach. Finally, the author suggests that enlarging the number of
respondents beyond the 421 involved in the study, looking at other
variables such as sex, ethnicity, and location, and including other
countries would be logical ways to extend this research.

This book offers a very comprehensive look at language and national
identity in France and Sweden and provides a useful model for conducting
similar comparative analyses. One question that emerges from this research
is to what degree highly fluent foreigners are tolerated and the extent to
which this is a reflection of a certain type of national identity. The
Swedes, like the Japanese, often become highly suspect of outsiders who
master their language whereas the French seem delighted by the efforts of
foreigners to speak French. Finally, from a theoretical standpoint, it
would be very interesting to expand this analysis by examining the
semiotic processes that bear on language attitudes and ideologies such as
indexicality, fractal recursivity, and erasure (cf. Irvine and Gal 2000).

REFERENCES

Flaitz, J.  (1988) The Ideology of English: French Perceptions of English
as World Language.  Berlin/New York/Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter.

Giles, H. (1979) "Ethnicity markers in speech."  In Social Markers in
Speech, K. R. Sherer and H. Giles (eds), 251-89.  Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Giles, H., Mulac, A., Bradac, J. J. and Johnson, P. (1987).  "Speech
accommodation theory: The next decade and beyond."  In Communication
Yearbook.  Vol. 10.  Newbury Park: Sage.

Irvine, Judith and Susan Gal (2000). "Language Ideology and Linguistic
Differentiation." In Paul V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language. Santa
Fe, NM: School of American Research. Press. Pp. 35-83.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Cecilia Cutler received her Ph.D. in linguistics from New York
University in May 2002.  Her interests include sociolinguistic
questions pertaining to language and identity, language ideologies,
and the dynamics of outgroup language use.

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