Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

76 Language Planning and Education
of the European nation state: the Romantic conception of the nation as a community
based on kinship and consanguinity, ‘Gemeinschaft’, and the nation conceived of
as a voluntary association of citizens, ‘Gesellschaft’ (see Chapter 3). Even within the
latter, however, there are variations. In France, for example, language has traditionally
had greater ideological significance than in Great Britain, as McDonald (1989:
5) points out:
There is nothing in the British context to match the linguistic sensitivity of
France. The French language and French national self-definition are deeply
implicated, the one in the other, and linguistic self-consciousness and political
centralism have been closely linked features of the French nation.
This greater linguistic sensitivity in concert with a pronounced tendency towards
political centralism is probably, as we shall see, one of the reasons for the more
retarded official status of Breton compared with Welsh.
A second qualification is that while linguistic homogenisation has indeed been an
intermittent objective of European nation state policies, minority language decline
has also occurred as a side effect of state polices that on other grounds might be
considered beneficial. For example, if isolation is favourable to minority language
maintenance, then the building of roads and railways, the construction of factories
and the widening of leisure opportunities may all contribute to the undermining of
those tightly knit social networks that help sustain the minority language.
A third point is that the nation state, and the identity associated with it, is not
fixed and unalterable but an ongoing construction project, in which the historical
tendency to marginalise minority languages has attenuated in recent years. Thus,
throughout a range of European regions – Catalonia, the Basque country, the South
Tyrol in Italy, and Wales – regional languages have been readmitted to the civic
realm, and in some cases accorded co-equal status in their territories with the
dominant majority language. Even France, along with Greece one of the states most
suspicious of concessions to regional languages, has recently signed the European
Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, 4 which requires signatory states to
protect and promote these languages in such fields as education, public services,
cultural activities and the media. 5 The reimagining of the nation state in the direction
of greater ethnolinguistic democracy, for which May (2001: 311) calls, may, in short,
have already commenced.
The case of Ireland shows, meanwhile, that official status and state support may
not be sufficient to arrest language decline, for here Irish continues to succumb to
socio-economic anglicising forces (see O’Riagain 2001) despite its formal status as a
national language and despite extensive support through the state-funded education
system.
Our conclusion, then, is equivocal. On the one hand, there is ample evidence that
the processes of European nation-building have involved the institutionalisation of
the languages of the powerful and dominant at the expense of minority languages,
which have been excluded and subordinated. It is clear also that the sociolinguistic
legacy of this history remains with us, taking the form of stigmatisation and