As the Belgian
elections prove, language can be a divisive issue
Each nation's attachment to its language
puts it on the frontline of national and international disputes
A rally in
Less
than half an hour's train ride from the multilingual hub of
At
his behest, the council also passed a law – later struck down for infringing
freedom of speech – that all signs in the town's
weekly market must be in Flemish, after a meat-seller displayed a sign in
Arabic. "People have to speak Dutch," De Block says. "I think
that we must defend the Flemish culture. It's really necessary because the
other influences are very strong."
Language
would seem like an unlikely candidate for such an intense power struggle.
"Most people never think about their language at all, and never attach any
emotional significance to it," argues Paul Brass in his book Elite
Competition and Nation Formation. Yet it is precisely this unconscious
attachment that has put it on the frontline of national and international
disputes and at the heart of many political identities.
What
we speak and why is no accident, but rather a product of power struggles for
economic, political and cultural supremacy or resistance. The
During
the second world war, German-Americans were arrested
in the
Language,
then, all too often becomes the most intimate proxy for broader societal
conflicts that have little to do with what people actually speak. "National
languages are . . . almost always semi-artificial constructs and occasionally .
. . virtually invented," writes Eric Hobsbawm in
Nations and Nationalism. "They are the opposite of what nationalist
mythology supposes them to be, namely the primordial foundations of national
culture and the matrices of the national mind. They are usually attempts to
devise a standardised idiom out of a multiplicity of actually spoken idioms,
which are thereafter downgraded to dialects."
The
best example of this is Hebrew, which by the end of the 18th century was
reduced to a classical language – a religious tongue reserved for liturgies and
the synagogue – but almost never spoken socially. Reviving it from a written
language to a spoken one was regarded as crucial to the Zionist project that
created the state of
Historically,
there is a particularly loose attachment between modern nations and their
so-called national languages. The notion that a British monarch would speak
English as their native tongue – if indeed at all – is a relatively recent one,
and the barons responsible for the Magna Carta, who
are today hailed as the among the first patriots, did not speak English. Hobsbawm estimates that only 2.5% of Italians spoke the
national language at the time of unification. "We have made
At
the time of the French revolution, half of
"The
19th century in
All
the more ironic, then, that in the 21st century there would be such a push to tie
language to citizenship and inclusion, particularly throughout
Often,
the greater the geographic proximity in which these languages are spoken, the
greater the tension. But where Flemish culture is concerned, the primary threat
is not really French but American culture and the English language. A quick
look at what Belgians go to watch at the cinema illustrates this perfectly. In
2007, the top 10 most popular films in
The
most popular local film, Ben X (which was in Flemish), came in at number 19,
grossing less than
I
speak fluent French. But a Belgian journalist I spoke to suggested I make calls
to the country's local mayors in English to avoid hostility. Back in Merchtem, De Block was showing his lenient side. "Of
course, if an immigrant from
De
Block tells me this in his office, in the town hall . . . in English. When I
point this out to him, he shrugs.
Article
by Gary Younge
Monday
14th June 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/14/belgian-elections-language-explosive-issue