Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM)

attitude is most prominent in education, where the
dominant language is often used exclusively from the
primary level onward.
In some cases, even
though many minority
children have not had
the opportunity to
learn the dominant
language before they
enter the education
system, they are
punished when they
use their indigenous
language. 22 in Africa, for
example, all secondary
education is conducted
in a european language
such as English, French,
or Portuguese, and
none of the languages
that are native to the
continent are used at all;
only a small percentage
of these languages are
even used in primary
education. 23 Historically, the birth of state policies against
the use indigenous languages paralleled the rise
of nationalism and
the formation of the
concept of the nation
state. in general, the
empires that dominated
Europe before the
19
in such
countries, other
public services, like
the justice system and
employment programs,
are also conducted in
the dominant language
or the language of the
relevant European
colonizer, and speakers
of small, indigenous
languages do not have the ability to navigate the
maze of government bureaucracy to gain access to
these opportunities.
th century tolerated
minority languages; the
Ottoman empire was
especially accepting
of smaller languages
and allowed local
administration and
education to operate
in those languages. 24
The mid-19th century,
Many African countries have European languages as the official or one however, saw the
of the official languages.
birth of the nation
state, the idea that a
government derived
legitimacy by ruling
over a unitary ethnic or
cultural group. in order
to claim legitimacy
under this definition,
many governments
began to impose the
dominant population’s
language on the
minority population.
the fact that there
were minority linguistic
As people move from rural areas to cities, more languages will become
groups in the first
endangered and eventually extinct.
place suggests that
the concept of a nation state has always been more
theoretical than pragmatic, but in order to maintain
the myth of the nation state, governments had to
14
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