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Minority languages and language revitalisation 73 to assess the opportunity costs of maintaining their language as greater than those involved in shifting to the dominant language. A typical scenario is one in which a relatively isolated community is brought through processes of urbanisation, industrialisation or other forces of modernisation (e.g. education, media, tourism etc.) into increased contact with a more powerful, wealthier, possibly more numerous community. As the language of this dominant group is progressively associated in the minds of minority language speakers with wealth, power and opportunity, so it becomes more attractive, and often more necessary, to learn. Conversely, the recessive language – as it loses speakers – comes to be associated with lack of opportunity, the elderly, the past, the rural and the backward. In these perceptions are mingled objectively accurate judgements as to the relative balance of economic opportunities, but also elements of self-denigration that are all too easily developed when the minority language is disparaged by members of the dominant group and marginalised by political arrangements denying it a role in the public realm – in state-funded education, for example. Matters are considerably worse if literacy in the declining language is restricted, if it lacks a literary tradition and if standardisation is incomplete or recent, for all these tend to weaken prestige. Language shift in such circumstances is, of course, scarcely painless. Speakers are often deeply attached to the cultures, identities and histories embedded in their minority language, but they may nevertheless feel that for economic reasons they simply cannot afford to transmit the language to their offspring. Here, the problems of individual versus collective choices present themselves, and can be modelled psychologically as follows: if a speaker of a minority language decides for reasons of culture and identity to transmit that language to their children, while others of the same community transmit the dominant and more economically advantageous language, they risk ending up a double loser. First, they forgo the economic advantages available through the dominant language, and second, having done so, they may find that not enough speakers of the minority language remain for it to be viable. Anticipating others choices, they may reason that it is better to go with the flow and transmit the majority language in the first place. 4.1.2 The role of the nation state in minority language decline Missing from the scenario sketched above, it may be argued, is any explicit mention of the nation state and nationalist ideology, which several writers have implicated in minority language marginalisation and loss. Dorian (1998: 18), for example, goes so far as to assert that: it is the concept of the nation state coupled with its official standard language, developed in Europe and extended to the many once-colonial territories of European states, that has in modern times posed the keenest threat to both the identities and the languages of small communities. Grillo (1989: 173) talks, meanwhile, of a nation-state ‘ideology of contempt’
74 Language Planning and Education towards subordinated, minority languages; and May (2001: 75) too is similarly critical, arguing that the principal difficulty of the key nationalist principle of nationstate congruence, the idea that the civic culture of the state and that of the nation should be co-extensive and singular, lies ‘in its inability to accommodate and/or recognise the legitimate claims of nations without states, or national minorities’. The weight and prevalence of these views is such that it seems useful to pause here to give them due consideration. And, when one looks, there does indeed appear to be a considerable measure of scholarly agreement that the modern European nation state, since its emergence in the late eighteenth century, has been – to a degree far greater than the empires that preceded it (e.g. the Ottoman empire) – a homogenising institution. Homogenising because, through education and military conscription, it has promoted a common standardised language so as to fashion a national culture to which its citizens can give allegiance in the place of more primordial attachments (see May 2001: 54–6), and because it has been reluctant to concede status to regional languages lest this excite separatist tendencies. It has, moreover, not refrained from coercion in pursuit of these goals, as we see below. 4.1.2.1 The Jacobin project and the linguistic homogenisation of the nation state This coercive dimension is perhaps most visible in the Jacobin project (see Grillo 1998), dating from the French Revolution of 1789–94, one of whose key objectives was to build a new republic of equality and fraternity around a single, unifying language. It is a project that has influenced the state’s policies on French and the regional languages of France (Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Basque, Occitan, Flemish, Alsatian) right down to the very recent past. For the Jacobins, these regional languages (‘patois’) represented parochialism, feudalism, backwardness and the Ancien Regime, and they therefore merited eradication, as is made clear, famously, in Abbé Grégoire’s report of 16th Prairal, Year II of the French Republic (6 June 1794) to the National Convention on ‘The need and the means to eradicate the patois and to universalise the use of the French language’. Here, Grégoire states: Unity of language is an integral part of the Revolution. If we are ever to banish superstition and bring men closer to the truth, to develop talent and encourage virtue, to mould all citizens into a national whole, to simplify the mechanism of the political machine and make it run more smoothly, we must have a common language. (Cited in Grillo 1989: 24) More explicitly hostile to linguistic difference still is Bertrand Barère’s muchquoted speech to the National Convention of 8th Pluviôse (1794), in which he declares that: Le fédéralisme et la superstition parlent bas-breton; l’émigration et la haine de la République parlent allemand; la contre-révolution parle italien, et le fanatisme parle le basque. Cassons ces instruments de dommage et d’erreur. [Federalism and
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