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INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE

a
WILLIAM SAFRAN
a
University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado

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Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 10:1–14, 2004

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ISSN: 1353–7113 print

DOI: 10.1080/13537110490450746

INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICAL ASPECTS

OF LANGUAGE

WILLIAM SAFRAN
University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado
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Language is a marker of ethnic identity; a vehicle for expressing a

distinct culture; a source of national cohesion; and an instrument
for building political community. Yet the relationship between lan-
guage and ethnonational identity is a contested matter. There is
no question that language is one of the elements defining col-
lective consciousness, the others being religion, history, common
descent, and territory. In the 19th century, language was consid-
ered the major defining factor of a nation, at least in Europe; and
it was almost taken for granted that each linguistic community de-
served to have its own state. The German language was a crucial
element in politically mobilizing a number of kingdoms, duchies,
and city-states in central Europe toward a national state, the fight
against Napoleon was the proximate mobilizing event. However,
pan-Germanic unity—the unification of Germany and Austria—
was blocked by dynastic and religious rivalries, and its achieve-
ment under Hitler was short-lived. Language was the most impor-
tant force for Italian political unity; but the imposition of standard
Italian has not prevented the survival of regional idioms, nor has it
been sufficient for overcoming the economic, social, and cultural
divisions between northern Italy and the Mezzogiorno. Conversely,
the collapse of unity in post-Tito Yugoslavia must not be attributed
entirely, and perhaps even primarily, to linguistic divisions, for the
conflicts among the components of that state also had religious,
historical, and other translinguistic causes.
In the opinion of T.R. Gurr, “language issues alone are not a
common source of deadly rivalries, because language differences,

Address correspondence to William Safran, Department of Political Science, University

of Colorado, Campus Box 333, Boulder, CO 80309, USA. E-mail: safran@colorado.edu

1
 NEP TJ1076-02 April 27, 2004 20:52

2 W. Safran

unlike racial and religious ones, are subject to individual and col-
lective compromises. Individuals in heterogeneous societies can
and ordinarily do speak several languages, but they cannot be both
black and white or both Hindu and Muslim.”1
Many political scientists consider language secondary com-
pared to other factors of identitive demarcation and the forma-
tion of national consciousness. This is particularly true of construc-
tivists and “rational choice” instrumentalists, such as Hobsbawm,
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Gurr, and Brass.2 Most of them stress class and economic determi-
nants; and they tend to have a common theme: the competition for
scarce resources. Thus, the competition between majority and mi-
nority language groups is essentially a competition for economic
power.
David Laitin, a proponent of the “rational-choice” thesis, mini-
mizes the importance of language, arguing that for reasons of prac-
tical adaptation, e.g., getting a job or civic rights, an ethnic group
will adopt the language of the majority, even to the point of giving
up its language. Often, however, minorities do not give up their
linguistic heritage without a fight, even if the payoff is significant.
During the Soviet period, only a relatively small number of non-
Slavic peoples in the federal republics of the Soviet Union switched
to Russian, despite the political advantages of doing so.3 One ex-
planation is the official legitimation of “national” languages and
the institutional support structure (e.g., parallel school systems);
but there are two other explanations: the existence of a regional
system of patronage, and the association of selected languages
with old traditions, including religious ones. Since the Baltic coun-
tries regained their independence, many Russians are said to have
switched to the local language because of promises of political and
economic payoffs,4 as well as restrictive language laws. Yet despite
these carrot-and-stick incentives, others have maintained their Rus-
sian language—either as the primary language or the household
idiom, whether for cultural reasons or because of nostalgia for the
Soviet system.5
There is no doubt that the economic dimension—and that of
the related element of social class—figures heavily in the language
struggles in most of the countries dealt with in this volume. Eco-
nomics has played a role in Anglophone dominance in Canada; in
the Tamil struggle for ethnolinguistic recognition; in the pressure
on the Russian-speaking minority in Latvia to give up Russian in
 NEP TJ1076-02 April 27, 2004 20:52

Introduction 3

order to obtain privileges of full citizenship; in the threat presented

to the middle-class status of speakers of Assamese by the claims of
speakers of Bengali in the Indian federal state of Assam; and in the
fact that in India, English is increasingly becoming the language
of the national as well as regional economic elite. In Norway and
Greece, language differences are correlated with regional differ-
ences and urban-rural distinctions, but even there, the economic
element is undeniable. German regional dialects v. High German;
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The Alsatian, Basque, and Breton languages in France and the re-
gional dialects in Germany survived longer in rural areas than in
the cities; in India, it is primarily the poor and uneducated who
continue to speak regional ethnic languages.
Nevertheless, if economic advantage were decisive, a num-
ber of ethnic minorities—the speakers of Breton, Basque, Irish
Gaelic, Welsh, and Yiddish, for example—would not be fighting
to preserve their language. Some members of ethnic minorities
have given up the fight, of course, but others have not, and there
is no point in arguing that the latter are less “rational.” Moreover,
official policies aimed at linguistic uniformization may reinforce,
or create, cultural resistance and exacerbate interethnic friction.
Examples are numerous: they include the policy of the Turkish
authorities government of forbidding the use of the Kurdish lan-
guage (at least until the early 1990s); the Slovak policy forbidding
the public use of Hungarian; legislation enacted in Sri Lanka in
1956 to make Sinhalese the only official language, which gener-
ated massive demand by Tamils for autonomy; the legislation in
the 1960s to make Assamese the official language of the Indian
federal state of Assam at the expense of Bengali; and the linguis-
tic Arabization policy of the Algerian government, which has pro-
voked strong opposition by the Berbers, a minority ethnic group in
Kabylia; the language policies of post-Soviet Ukraine, under which
the use of Russian in instruction has been discouraged and under-
funded; the policies of Latvia, which have made citizenship—and
privileges connected with it—dependent on proficiency in Latvian
and made life difficult for Russian speakers, a situation described
in the analysis of Fredrika Björklund.6 In 1982, a television channel
using the Welsh language was introduced after a strike by the leader
of the Welsh Nationalist Party (Plaid Cymru). The language law in
Moldavia in 1989, which made Romanian the only official language
and required officials serving in Gagauz and Russian-speaking
 NEP TJ1076-02 April 27, 2004 20:52

4 W. Safran

(Transdniester) areas to be proficient in Romanian—a policy orig-

inally intended to facilitate future unification with Romania—led
to the creation of a Gagauz Khalk Movement and the declaration
of an independent Gagauz Republic. This was declared illegal;
but negotiations for some form of autonomy are still going on.
The language issue in Afghanistan—the quest for equal status of
Uzbek with Pashto and Dari—might well be a stumbling block in
the efforts at creating a democratic constitution for a unified state.
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As the essays in this collection show, this competition is not

only an interethnic rivalry but also a conflict between elites and
masses, religion and secularism, and “official” and de facto lan-
guages. Languages are not only tools of nation-building but also
means of political control. That is why ethnic minorities use
language—for example, the demand for bilingualism—as a polit-
ical strategy—as “a form of protest against political domination.”7
Most of the debates by political scientists about language cen-
ter on its relationship to the state; this debate constitutes the focus
of the case studies in this volume. All have a “systemic” approach
which is also, to some extent, chronological; and all go beyond po-
litical science—as they must, because the explanation for adapting
to language policies or resisting them are economic, geographical,
psychological, and cultural. These cases are all different, but they
are illustrative of situations in many other countries.
The debate about the relationship between language and
state is sharpened by the fact that there is no congruence, and
no uniform causal direction, between the one and the other.8
German, Italian, and Assamese are pre-political language com-
munities; Arabic, English and Spanish are more or less indepen-
dent of the state; Irish Gaelic, Hebrew, and the two Norwegian
languages preceded the formation of the state but their develop-
ment has been heavily influenced by it; and the relationship of
French and Afrikaans to the state is ambiguous. Tito’s Yugoslavia
represents an instance of the state not only providing the offi-
cial definition of the national language—i.e., Serbo-Croatian, re-
ferred to by many as the “Yugoslav” language—but of defining
and, indeed, creating an ethnic community, as in the case of the
Bosnians, who were endowed with an identity distinct from that of
their neighbors, who spoke the same language. After the collapse
of Yugoslavia, a reverse process began to take place: an attempt to
create a separate Bosnian language to demarcate the speakers of a
 NEP TJ1076-02 April 27, 2004 20:52

Introduction 5

newly-independent region from those of another. Conversely,

as Nancy Johnson shows in her discussion of Senegal, people
who adopted the Wolof language proceeded gradually to em-
brace a Wolof ethnicity—which suggests that ethnicity is a cul-
tural construct rather than simply a “primordial” reality. Belgium,
Great Britain, Canada, India, Russia, South Africa, Spain, and
Switzerland each constitute a single political community in which
several languages are spoken. Conversely, Arabic, English, French,
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German, Spanish, Russian, and Swahili are spread throughout sev-

eral countries, although there are significant “national” variations
in these languages.
The vast majority of states are formally unilingual but con-
tain more than one language community. Multilingual countries
in which language has been a political issue have included Assam,
Belgium, Cameroon, Canada, Estonia, India, Ireland, Israel,
Latvia, Malaysia, Norway (if Nynorsk and Bokmål are considered
two distinct languages), Singapore, Spain, Sri Lanka, Switzerland,
South Africa, and Ukraine. In some cases, such multilingualism
tends to be a largely formal matter, which may or may not imply
equality. In other cases, language pluralism has real meaning, as,
for example, in Belgium, Canada, Norway, South Africa, Spain, and
Switzerland. But even in these countries, equality is not absolute: in
Switzerland, German, or rather Schwyzerdütsch, is far more widely
spoken than French or Italian; in Spain, Castilian is the lingua
franca of the whole country whereas Basque, Catalan, and Gali-
cian are confined to specific regions; in Norway, Bokmål occupies
a somewhat more favored position compared to Nynorsk;9 and in
Belgium, bilingualism is far more widespread among the Flemings
than among the Walloons. Nevertheless, in these countries there
are translinguistic values, and interests—both among the elite and
the population as a whole—that make political unity possible: ge-
ography, common historical experiences, and economic interests.
In Canada, as Linda Cardinal demonstrates, the battle of Franco-
phones for practical equality with Anglophones is a continuing
one.
Languages are not equivalent when it comes to cultural
weight, literary allusions, sentiments associated with them, size of
vocabulary, religious meaning, or elite preferences. Nor are all
languages equally useful for wide communication. Most languages
have the potential of becoming transethnic languages, if their
 NEP TJ1076-02 April 27, 2004 20:52

6 W. Safran

vocabularies are appropriately developed. Such development,

however, is normally undertaken by institutions tied to the state,
and therefore has a specific “national” orientation.
The state cannot relate equally to all languages within its bor-
ders, especially if they are numerous. There are more than 170
languages in Sudan, more than 250 in Cameroon, more than 300
in Nigeria, and several dozen languages in India. Because many of
these languages have significant cultural legacies it is not desirable
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to eliminate them in the interest of building a unified nation; nor is

it possible, given the fact that these languages are spoken by many
people. It is conceivable that a state could persuade all inhabitants
to use a common language, but that is a very gradual process; or
it could pursue a policy of rapid linguistic assimilation, but that
would require authoritarian methods. In order to depoliticize the
problem in India, 13 languages were declared to be “official”; but
in order to have a medium of transethnic communication needed
for nation-building, the federal authorities decided to adopt En-
glish as a superordinate language, despite the fact that it was the
language of the former colonial power, because it had become a
transethnic or “postethnic” language. Similarly, the language con-
flict was depoliticized in Cameroon by the use of both French and
English; and in post-apartheid South Africa by the legitimation of
the use of the Xosa, Zulu, and other indigenous languages as well
as English and Afrikaans.
What happens to national or ethnic languages, and, for that
matter, to their speakers is often attributed to the state and to its
leaders. For Eric Hobsbawm, languages are basically products of
the state.10 He is of course aware of the fact that national languages
are not created ex nihilo by elites; they are based on existing vocab-
ularies, folklores, and literary or oral traditions. (Esperanto, an
artificially constructed linguistic pastiche, has been successful nei-
ther as a national nor international medium). This is true of all
the languages dealt with in the various chapters of the present
volume: Afrikaans, Arabic, Berber, English, French, Latvian,
Russian, Wolof, and others. But to Hobsbawm, these are mere di-
alects rather than national languages if they do not serve to mobi-
lize people for statehood. National languages are products of state
action, and, more specifically, political elites and institutions. That
is not to say that states invent languages; but they react to their
preexistent reality in various ways—by reforming them or leaving
 NEP TJ1076-02 April 27, 2004 20:52

Introduction 7

them alone; legitimating or denigrating them; granting them

institutional support or withholding it; or manipulating them for a
variety of purposes—nationalism, democratization, social control,
the oppression of minorities, ethnic homogenization, the manage-
ment of ethnic conflict, the dissemination of civic attitudes, the
spreading of a religion or secularism, and so on. If a language is
merely local, it is “almost invisible”11 because it cannot be shared or
used for larger purposes, such as state-building. For that purpose
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the state uses elites who, in turn, use the print media and edu-
cation as tools for sharing culture; but the linguistic role of elites,
although important for modernization and industrialization, is not
ipso facto conducive to the building of a modern nation.
According to Ernest Gellner, nationalism can take root only in
societies in which education is a universal virtue. And if the masses
are to be educated by the elites, who are in charge of education,
a certain amount of homogeneity must exist between the former
and the latter. In particular, it must be possible for them to com-
municate in the same language. The elite has its own language;
this is primarily a “print” language, which cannot easily be dissem-
inated among the masses until they learn to read. For purposes
of mobilization, however, it is much more practical to adopt the
language spoken by the common people than to introduce Latin
or some other “elite” language. This explains why nation-building
is closely bound up with the emergence of vernacular languages.
French, Italian and other “vulgar” Romance languages won out
over Latin; Aramaic, Yiddish, and Ladino displaced Hebrew for
many generations; and Hebrew won out in the Jewish community
of pre-independence Palestine not because of the efforts of Zionist
intellectuals but those of the workers, farmers, and schoolteachers
who organized a strike in 1914. The development of the French
language follows the “street” rather than the rules of the Académie
Française or the policies of the government.12
In order for those languages to play their “nationalizing” role,
however, they must be institutionalized, that is, they must be associ-
ated with the educational system. Gellner’s theory of the politically
unifying role of language, however, is not fully borne out in Latin
America and the Arabic-speaking countries. Gellner’s theory also
must be questioned on another ground: in the past, the poten-
tially state-creating elite spoke a language different from that of the
masses, and there always existed the danger that if the creation of a
 NEP TJ1076-02 April 27, 2004 20:52

8 W. Safran

state were coupled with democracy, the vernacular language would

prevail and, as a consequence, demote the role of the elite. Unfor-
tunately, in newly independent countries, elites (who are, by defini-
tion, removed from the masses) are often more comfortable in the
language of the former colonial overlords of their country than in
their “national” languages. This applied not only to Léopold Sédar
Senghor, the president of Senegal (as Nancy Johnson points out),
but also to Jawaharlal Nehru, Eamon de Valera, and many other
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state-building leaders.
National identity is not always related to a specific language,
even if that language is a “core” ethnonational idiom. The Irish
express their nationalism in English more often that in Irish
Gaelic; many citizens of Kiev and Odessa consider themselves loyal
Ukrainian “nationals” while maintaining Russian as their language;
and many members of the Indian elite express their Indian identity
more comfortably in English than in Hindi or Bengali.
There is reciprocal relationship between states and languages:
a language may (and in most cases does) antedate a political com-
munity, and it may give rise to political mobilization that leads to
the creation of a state; but once established, the state manipulates
the language so that it can be used effectively to make citizens
and disseminate national values. In many cases it is the state that
maintains, legitimates, and occasionally even “rehabilitates” a lan-
guage, as in the cases of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, France,
Norway, and Israel.
The role of institutions in language maintenance and in man-
aging language rivalry is crucial; but institutional intervention must
be judicious, for otherwise it may exacerbate conflict. The Turkish
government’s proscription of the public use of the Kurdish lan-
guage bred violence; as did Slovak nationalist policies that limited
the public use of Hungarian.13 In Sri Lanka, the official monopoly
of the Sinhalese language provoked a reaction on part of speak-
ers of Tamil language and led to the expansion of ethnic conflict
in the 1970s. In the Indian federal state of Assam, attempts to
make Assamese the official language created resentment among
speakers of Bengali.14
In Algeria, as Mohamed Benrabah shows, the insistence upon
language monopoly, in this particular case promoted by system-
atic and forcible Arabization, has not contributed to national in-
tegration; on the contrary, it has exacerbated divisions—between
 NEP TJ1076-02 April 27, 2004 20:52

Introduction 9

Arabs and Berbers, between speakers of Arabic only and bilingual

speakers, and between Islamists and secularists. The aim of this
linguistic policy is to inculcate as a major value, not the Arabic
language, but Islam. The Arabic language is used in textbooks
to glorify Islam as well as to denigrate secularism and the Berber
(Kabyle) language and culture and to distort history (e.g., by refer-
ring to “Arabs” as having “liberated” the Berbers and to Arab con-
querors as “Muslims”). The leaders of Algeria, soon after achiev-
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ing independence for their country, rejected French because it

was the language of imperialism; but in substituting Arabic they
introduced a new problem: for Arabic, in particular its classical
variant, was closely associated with Islam and not with the idiom of
the common people. Thus, rather than functioning as an instru-
ment for promoting democracy—and the sort of secular culture
generally associated with modernization—the Arabization policy
contributed to the power of the ulemas and promoted Islamization
rather than nation-building. Moreover, the imposition of Arabic
was pursued in an authoritarian fashion and ignored the existing
polyglossia. To complicate matters, the gap between the masses and
the elite was maintained insofar as the latter often spoke French
and sent their children to French-language schools.
Ill-considered state intervention may have unanticipated
consequences—it may produce a perverse result if a neglected lin-
guistic minority feels that its cultural pride has been hurt. Much of
the opposition to the Algerian government must be attributed to
the delegitimation of the Berber and Tamazight languages as un-
sophisticated dialects—just as the Parisian intellectuals denigrated
Occitan, Breton, and other regional languages. The revival of inter-
est in these languages, associated with the revival of “infranational”
collective identity, is in part a reaction to this denigration. In post-
Soviet Latvia, the policy of discriminatory against Russian speakers
leads to resentment and does not promote political unity, at least
in the short run.
Of course, state-institutional input may be insufficient. As
Linda Cardinal indicates in her chapter, languages flourish or de-
cline not only because of the size and density of a language com-
munity, but also because of institutional reinforcement or neglect,
specifically, the failure to act energetically to rectify the imbalance
in Canada between the rights of English-speaking minority in Que-
bec and French-speaking minorities in Anglophone provinces.
 NEP TJ1076-02 April 27, 2004 20:52

10 W. Safran

However, neither the state-centered nor (neo-)institutionalist

explanation is sufficient. To be sure, the promotion of Czech
and Slovak as a national language before the creation of
Czechoslovakia, and the solid establishment of the Hebrew lan-
guage as a quotidian idiom after the State of Israel was established
(if not before), can be attributed to a variety of institutions, in-
cluding the schools. But the revival in the 19th century of these
languages was not primarily a matter of institutions; rather, it was a
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collective will to national revival and the stubbornness of selected

individuals, often working alone, such as Palacký, Safarik, and Ben-
Yehuda in “rehabilitating” their respective languages and putting
them, so to speak, on the map. But Palacký, Safarik, and Ben-
Yehuda were not fighting for political independence, at least in
the early years of their careers. Palacký and Safarik were concerned
with promoting Pan-Slavism and stressing the cultural unity of all
Slavs rather than state-building; and the linguistic efforts of Ben-
Yehuda were associated with Jewish “enlightenment” and secular-
ization movements of the 19th century, before statehood was enter-
tained as a realistic possibility.15 Purification and standardization
efforts have been made also in Breton-speaking regions of France,
but such efforts are hampered by inadequate institutional support
and by the rapid diminution of native speakers. Such support has
been growing, but has not resulted in a great enlargement of inter-
est on the part of the ethnic communities concerned—in part be-
cause it is too late. In any case, these language reforms do not nec-
essarily have mobilization for independent statehood as their goal.
Language is connected with ethnicity perhaps more than with
nationalism, but there is some argument about the causal direction
of that connection as well. A strong ethnic identity may lead a
person to maintain her language, or to reacquire it; conversely,
however, as Johnson has shown, the acquisition of a language may
lead to an identification with the ethnic community that speaks it.
In some cases, adopting the language of an ethnic group (Wolof)
implies the adoption of the ethnic identity tout court—as illustrated
in the case of Wolof.
In some cases, linguistic adaptation associated with religious
adaptation—but the causal direction is ambiguous. Irish nation-
alism held together less by language than by religion and espe-
cially memory, much of it associated with hatred of the English.
During the Reformation, Calvinism played a certain role in the
 NEP TJ1076-02 April 27, 2004 20:52

Introduction 11

development of Swiss nationalism, but that nationalism is held to-

gether less by religion or language than by the country’s status of
neutrality and even more, by money. The nexus between national
identity and religion also undeniable in Poland, Israel, Pakistan,
and Greece—but its connection with language is less clear. In Sri
Lanka, there is a correlation between Sinhalese ethnicity and Bud-
dhism and between Tamil ethnicity and Hinduism, but the correla-
tion is not absolute.16 But Jewish, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox
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religious identities have been maintained after a fashion despite

the dwindling use of the languages connected with these religions.
Yet it is difficult to imagine Islam from which Arabic is absent,
or Judaism from which Hebrew has entirely disappeared; or the
Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic variants of Christianity
from which their respective linguistic components have vanished
without a trace.
Political ideologies are sometimes associated with particu-
lar languages: French with secular republicanism; Hebrew with
Zionism; Russian with communism.17 Such an association is im-
perfect and sometimes unfair, given the fact that many Zionists
are not Hebrew speakers, communists have spread their doctrine
in many languages; and secular republicanism has become the
dominant ideology in most Western democracies. Still, there are
instances of language choices reflecting specific ideologies. As
Herman Giliomee shows in his chapter on South Africa, the im-
age of Afrikaans has been greatly tarnished by its association with
apartheid; and, as Mohamed Benrabah argues in his discussion
of Algeria, the official Arabization measures and the denigration
of minority languages are closely tied to a policy of Islamization.
In the middle ages, Ottoman Turks and Persians (Farsi) opted
for the Arabic alphabet, which was not quite appropriate for their
languages. In the early 1920s, Kemal Ataturk opted for the Latin
alphabet, in order to detach his country from Muslim orientations
and move Turkey toward “modernity,” i.e., construct a Turkish na-
tion out of the Ottoman one.
Not all languages have the same impact or the same fate. Nu-
merous languages have become extinct; according to one source,
about 96 percent of the world’s population speaks only 4 percent of
the 5,000–7,000 existing languages; and according to pessimistic
estimates, 90 percent of them are destined to disappear in this
century.18 Many of these languages cannot maintain themselves
 NEP TJ1076-02 April 27, 2004 20:52

12 W. Safran

in the face of globalization and the pressures of the market. It is

true that the internet, by facilitating transnational communication
among isolated and dispersed linguistic communities, can serve to
maintain minority languages, but some of them do not have alpha-
bets and cannot be transcribed.
Jean Laponce is not very optimistic about the future of “weak”
(i.e., minority) languages. In the era of international technology
and mass culture, he believes, they are fated to disappear. Lan-
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guages spoken by popular majorities and/or political and cultural

elites tend to dominate and make it difficult for minority languages
to maintain themselves. It has been estimated that in the past half
century, hundreds of languages have ceased to exist. In Canada
alone, as Laponce indicates, most of the 66 languages that were
spoken two centuries ago are now dead or dying, and only two sur-
vive meaningfully, despite selective government efforts to maintain
some of the rest. For the legitimation of a language is not enough;
speakers must want to use it and transmit it to their offspring, but
many, in fact, do not do this.
A “rational” response to this reality is linguistic retooling—the
abandonment of one language in favor of another, a more useful
one. This is possible, but difficult; a person may adapt to circum-
stances and acquire one or two languages for specific purposes, but
in most cases there is one language in which he is most comfort-
able. But the choice of language is not an “either-or” choice. There
is a reasonable way of preserving multilingualism as an important
cultural value while promoting transethnic languages for the pur-
pose of nation-building and international communication: a kind
of functional differentiation, that is, the use of different languages
in different circumstances, for example as follows:

r for international communication, especially in science and com-

merce: English;
r for regional, intranational, and transethnic communication:
Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Russian,
Spanish, Swahili;19
r for subnational, ethnic, tribal, and household communication:
native American languages in the United States and Canada;
Basque, Breton, Catalan, Sardinian, Welsh, Yiddish in Europe;
Chaldean in Iraq; and countless African and Asian ethnic
languages.
 NEP TJ1076-02 April 27, 2004 20:52

Introduction 13

That this is in fact happening is exemplified by the situation

in a typical multinational corporation in Europe: “In executive
meetings, if a majority speak French, German, or Spanish, then
the majority tongue is spoken; the minutes are in English. On
the factory floor, local languages prevail.”20 Analogous situations
obtain in effect in India, sub-Saharan Africa, Israel, and the smaller
European countries.
Governments have a variety of policy options between strin-
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gently enforced unilingualism and a total absence of any language

policy. These options range from multilingualism facilitated by
concrete measures to official unilingualism as a declared commit-
ment. Some of these options are largely theoretical, because dis-
tinctions between unilingual and multilingual countries are break-
ing down. In all formally multilingual countries, one language
tends to dominate; in formally unilingual countries more than one
languages is spoken. This development must be attributed to de-
colonization and globalization, which have had two contradictory
consequences. In many industrialized countries, the growth of im-
migration has created ethnolinguistic diasporas and contributed to
polyglossia; at the same time, standardization, global mass culture,
and the market have contributed to the dominance of a relatively
small number of world languages. The contradiction can be clearly
seen in South Africa. Since the end of apartheid, eleven languages
have become official and have achieved equality with English and
Afrikaans. But in fact some languages are “more equal” than oth-
ers when it comes to political advancement, civil service positions,
or access to universities. The various native languages are at a dis-
advantage vis-à-vis the two European “settler” languages, and es-
pecially English, which has become the most useful and the most
“transethnic” medium of global communication but which, one
hopes, will be “postethnic” enough to accommodate itself to some
sort of coexistence with other languages.

Notes

1. Ted Robert Gurr, Peoples v. States (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace
2000), p. 67.
2. Paul R. Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism (New Delhi, Newbury Park, CA, and
London: Sage, 1991).
 NEP TJ1076-02 April 27, 2004 20:52

14 W. Safran

3. David D. Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the

Near Abroad (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 43–49.
4. Laitin, Identity in Formation, pp. 14f.
5. Ibid., pp. 89–93.
6. Both Ukrainian and Latvian policies represent a continuation of the Soviet
patterns, except for a reversal of majority-minority relationship.
7. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives
(London: Pluto Press, 1993), p. 110.
8. William Safran, “Nationalism,” in Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), Handbook of Lan-
guage and Ethnic Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 77–93.
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9. See Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Elites, Language, and the Politics of Identity: The Nor-
wegian Case (Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 2003).
10. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1870 (Cambridge, UK:
University Press, 2nd ed., 1992).
11. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1983), p. 12.
12. William Safran, “Politics and Language in Contemporary France: Facing
Supranational and Infranational Challenges,” International Journal of the Soci-
ology of Language, no. 137 (1999), pp. 39–66.
13. See Beáta Kovács Nás, “Hungarians in Slovakia,” in Gurr, Peoples v. States,
pp. 183–187.
14. Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 2nd ed. (University of California
Press, 2000), p. 219.
15. William Safran, “Language and Nation-Building in Israel: Hebrew and its
Rivals,” Nations and Nationalism, 2004, forthcoming.
16. See Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism, p. 30.
17. William Safran, “Language, Ideology, and State-Building: A Comparison of
Policies in France, Israel and the Soviet Union,” International Political Science
Review, Vol. 13 (October 1992), pp. 397–414.
18. Stéphane Foucart, “Un comité d’experts s’alarme du nivellement linguistique
mondial,” Le Monde, 2 April 2003.
19. See Abram de Swaan, “The emergent world language system: An introduc-
tion,” International Political Science Review, Vol. 14 (1993), 219–226.//.
20. John Tagliabue, “In Europe, Going Global Means, Alas, English,” New York
Times, 19 May 2002.

William Safran is Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University

of Colorado, Boulder. He has contributed chapters to more than 30 books
and many articles on comparative, French, and ethnic politics. His most
recent books include The French Policy (6th edn., 2002); Nation, Religion and
Politics (editor, 2003); and Identity and Territorial Autonomy in Plural Societies
(co-editor, 2000). He has taught at City University of New York, Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, and the Universities of Grenoble, Bordeaux, and
Santiago de Compostela.