Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

Minority languages and language revitalisation 75
superstition speak Breton, emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German,
counter-revolution speaks Italian and fanaticism speaks Basque. Let us destroy
these instruments of harm and error.] (Cited in May 2001: 159)
Admittedly, Barère’s speech was made in a year of great external and internal danger
to the Revolution (from, for example, the insurrection in the Vendée), but it
nevertheless remains indicative of Jacobin ideology.
From a later period it is not difficult either to find evidence of the nation-stateinflicted
marginalisation of minority languages of which May (2001), Grillo (1989)
and others speak. Especially significant here, because of the delegitimation it implies,
is the exclusion of minority languages (e.g. Breton, Welsh) from the public elementary
school systems established in France, England and Wales in the late nineteenth
century. Around this time, or not long after, there also occur such episodes as the use
in some of Brittany’s schools of ‘le symbole’, a clog-like wooden object hung around
the neck of children caught speaking Breton. Its counterpart in Wales was the ‘Welsh
Not’, a kind of wooden placard worn by pupils discovered speaking Welsh (see Jones,
M. 1998a; McDonald 1989, Press 1994).
Outside school, too, there is in official discourse a pattern of derogation of
minority languages, a notorious instance of which is the episode of the ‘Blue Books’,
one name for the 1847 Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of
Education in Wales, which attributed the backwardness of Wales to the prevalence
of the Welsh language, remarking that:
The Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales and a manifold barrier to the
moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people. Because of their language
the mass of the Welsh people are inferior to the English in every branch of
practical knowledge and skill. He (the Welshman) is left to live in an underworld
of his own and the march of society goes completely over his head. (Cited in
Jones, R. 1993: 547)
Of course, policies and attitudes toward regional languages have been more vacillating,
and not always so hostile as the above quotation might suggest. McDonald
(1989: 47), for example, reports one general inspector of Brittany’s schools, by the
name of Carré, as firmly condemning the use of ‘le symbole’; and in the twentieth
century the negatively charged remarks of Pompidou and other Gaullists3 contrast
with the more positive stance, at least rhetorically, of Mitterand and socialist governments
post-1981 (see Safran 1999: 45). Overall, however, there is sufficient evidence
that the European nation state has exhibited an endemic bias toward monolingualism
in the dominant national language, or at best a ‘benign neglect’ of
minority languages (Temple 1994: 194), sufficient for us to give qualified support
to May (2001), Grillo (1989), Williams (1991a) and others’ critiques.
4.1.2.2 Qualifying the thesis of nation-state culpability
Qualifications are necessary, however, lest we arraign the nation state too facilely. The
first is that there are significant differences within and between the two main versions