This article was prompted by a conversation with a friend who is also a polyglot and an expat in Spain.
Across the world, there are dozens of examples of language policies coercing newcomers into speaking a local language or dialect in countries where more than one language is official. Oftentimes, one notices that many of these policies aren’t exactly friendly in the tone and manner in which they are worded nor is their restrictive implementation and execution when materialized in real linguistic contexts.
Many of them turn out to be, not surprisingly, strictly xenophobic in nature, despite the purported initial intentions of linguistic preservation and respect for the host culture.
Respect for local traditions becomes a buzz phrase for defense in its most primal meaning.
On closer inspection, these cultural cul-de-sacs driven exclusively by self-serving rationalizations are a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They simply serve a certain political discourse. The kind that limits freedom.
It suffices for an experienced polyglot to try to speak Schwyzerdütsch – a local variety of German spoken in parts of Switzerland – to be met with derision, or surprise – Just not the kind you would hope for. The same can be experienced in other settings and countries where there are similar linguistic realities.
Speakers of certain endangered varieties aren’t simply inclined to let foreigners walk around the gardens of their linguistic treasures without an identity pass of sorts. The characteristics of such pass is seldom evergreen and can greatly vary depending on the person in question, date of the year, personal circumstances and current political agendas.
The assumption that you should only communicate in said variety if you are a true speaker of the language, often meaning you were born and raised in the place where the language is originally spoken, is of first order. It is a reality that can be read between the lines.
As anything as culturally subjective as language and its deadly interaction in societies where citizens of first and second class are reunited in daily activities, the power inevitably lies in the hands of not many. The gatekeepers of the national pride instantiated in the national language.
People will grant “others” permission of this kind only if they consider them of higher ranking in the fuzzy space of social or economic hierarchy.
Such policies indicating the willingness to welcome and integrate strangers, only if they learn to communicate in a given variety, are subservient to a much more complex array of ideas of troublesome identitarian character – The idea of the nation-state. This idea is based on certain concepts which is increasingly set at odds with the realities of the modern world, where identity could only truly be established on an individual level because of the tremendous weight carried by the processes of migrations and cultural blending.
Interestingly, a lot of these linguistic policies are hardwired into pompous ideologies where concepts such as nation, identity and language merge into a conglomeration of ideas, feelings, emotions, which often contradict each other. Perhaps it is in this contradiction where their power lies.
As a matter of fact, if we took a closer look at these policies and their application we would see that the truth is often concealed not far beneath the surface. There are different ways to segregate and divide humans and, unfortunately, language, however abstract in nature, is suitable to do the job.
Restrictive language policies are used as a gateway to keep outsiders from getting too close to that which is deemed sacred, scarce and worth of national pride. In other words, such language policies ultimately serve to fulfill the purpose on a bigger scale of restricting the entry of foreigners to specific cultural and social environments with all the negative social and economic implications derived from such restrictions.
Language can be dangerously used as a way to deprive others of important knowledge or information, or simply serve to keep people outside of social interactions.
If you have experienced this sort of coercion, you will know what I am talking about.
The performative sophistication of the ways in which discriminatory behavior transforms as strangers strive to adapt can be ingenious, but never completely secret. Certain aspects of human nature are hard to disguise. We were made to notice.
The “know your place” is as ever present as it has always been. Luckily, things are changing.
Are you part of the change?
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