Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

JEZIK U UPOTREBI / LANGUAGE IN USE
on the other. The Thai and Greek nation-states define themselves as monoethnic
and with an official religion: Orthodox Christianity in Greece and Theravada
Buddhism in Thailand. As such, the state cannot officially accommodate ethnic
or ethnolinguistic minorities. This monolithic approach to nationhood also affects
language policy. Thus, the Turkish-speakers of Greece are officially Muslim
Greeks (as are Muslim speakers of Bulgarian and Romani), just as the Malayspeakers
of Thailand are Muslim Thais (Smalley 1994). 18
In the case of Christian and Buddhist linguistic minorities, respectively,
there is no official accommodation. Lao-speakers in Thailand are ethnic Thais,
and across the river in Lao People’s Democratic Republic, they are Laos. Northern
Khmer-speakers in Thailand are likewise counted as ethnic Thais. The Malayo-Polynesian
Moken of Thailand, and other groups whose peripatetic lifestyle
kept them outside the control of the state until only recently have become Thai
Mai ‘New Thais’ as they become settled (Lee 2009: 45-46). 19 Similarly, Orthodox
Albanian-speakers in Greece are officially Greeks, although the term Albanophone
Greek has also been used. The term Hellenophone Albanian for the Greek
speakers of neighboring Albania is never used, since Greece not only counts all
its citizens as Greeks regardless of home language, but also all Greek-speakers
outside of Greece. Likewise, the term Slavophone Greek is used for Bulgarian
and Macedonian Christians in Greece, but, e.g., Hellenophone Bulgarian for the
Greek-speakers of Bulgaria never occurs.
The deployment of religion to avoid reference to language (and by implication,
a different nation-state) in Greece has gone so far that volume five
(1996-1998) of the journal Ellēnikē dialektologia ʻGreek dialectology’, which
was devoted to Oi díglōsses omádes tou ellēnikoú khṓrou ‘The bilingual communities
of the Greek people’ – the official line being that since everyone in Greece
is Greek, all other languages are secondary, and being a monolingual speaker
of another language is impossible – listed six languages: Arvanítika, Vlákhika,
Ispanoevraíïka, Pomákika, Tsingánika, Mousoulmaniká Thrákēs ‘Arvanitika,
Aromanian [Vlah], Judeo-Spanish [Judezmo, Ladino], Pomak, Gypsy [Romani],
Muslimish of Thrace’. 20 This last is a reference to Turkish. However, Pomak is
18
According to Collins and Zahrani (1999: 137) there are also Pak-Thai (southern Thai) speakers
in Malaysia, but the number is unknown.
19
The Thai terms Chao Lay ‘Sea People’ and Chao Nam ‘Water People’ are also still used, the latter
being offensive to the Moken since ‘water’ is a euphemism for ‘semen’ in Moken.
20
Arvanitika denotes a group of dialects that separated from the main body of Albanian many
centuries ago. While Arvanitika can be treated as a separate Albanic language, it is close enough to
Tosk (southern) Albanian for speakers to be able to communicate if there is a need or desire to do
so (cf. the Scandinavian languages). Nonetheless, the term has a long history of referring to these
Albanian dialects of Greece, and the speakers themselves use the older term Arbërisht for referring
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