Language policies of different countries

France serves as a good example of a country which has a single national language and does
little or nothing for any other language. Most inhabitants simply assume that French is rightly the
language of France. Consequently, they virtually ignore other languages so that there is little
national interest in any move to try to ascertain exactly how many people speak Provençal or
Breton or to do anything for, or against, Basque. Likewise, if an immigrant group to France, e.g.,
Algerians or Vietnamese, wants to try to preserve its language, it must try to do so in its own
time and with its own resources, for it is widely assumed that French is the proper language of
instruction in schools in France. (The only major exception is that German is taught in Alsace.)
This situation is little different from the one that existed in the old colonial days, in which it was
assumed that the French language and the curriculum of Metropolitan France were entirely
appropriate in the lycées of colonies such as Algeria and Indo-China (now Vietnam) attended by
the more fortunate local children, who might then aspire to higher education in France. France is
a highly centralized country with Paris its dominant center even to the extent that when traveling
in France you often see signposts indicating exactly how far you are from Paris (actually from
the cathedral of Notre Dame, its symbolic center). It has been so since the time of Richelieu.
France and the French language are inseparable.

Regional languages such as Breton, Basque, Occitan, Flemish, Catalan, Corsican, and Franco-
Provençal persist, get varying amounts of state support, and provide local identities to those who
maintain them. Such languages may be tolerated but they cannot be allowed to threaten a state
unified around French. The French, of course, are not alone in seeing their country as essentially
a monolingual one; the English just across the Channel and the Japanese right across the world
are like them in this respect.

Adjacent to France we have in one direction the multilingualism of Switzerland and in another
the bilingualism of Belgium, but it is the second of these to which I will refer. Today, French and
Flemish (Dutch) coexist in a somewhat uneasy truce in Belgium. The struggle between the
French and Flemish in that country has a long history. In 1815 the politically and socially
ascendant French in Belgium found themselves returned at the end of the Napoleonic Wars to
Dutch rule. William of Holland proceeded to promote Dutch interests and language and limit the
power of the French, the Walloons. He was also a strong Calvinist, and in 1830 both Flemish and
Walloon Catholics rebelled and gained independence for Belgium. However, this religious unity
between the Flemish Catholics and the Walloon Catholics soon gave way to cleavage along
linguistic lines, language proving in this case to be a stronger force for divisiveness than religion
for cohesion. The new state became French-oriented and Flemish was banned from the
government, law, army, universities, and secondary schools.

French domination was everywhere, and it was not until the twentieth century that the Flemish,
who are actually a majority of the population, were able to gain a measure of linguistic and social
equality. Today’s equality, however, is still colored by memories of past discrimination based on
language. The Belgians have tried to settle their differences by separating the languages on a
territorial basis and regarding Brussels as a bilingual city, even though it is clearly French
dominant. Periodically, however, linguistic differences surface in Belgium to create tensions
between the Walloons and the Flemish, just as they do, as we will see, in Canada.
Turkey provides a good example of very deliberate language planning designed to achieve
certain national objectives and to do this very quickly. When Kemal Atatürk (ata ‘father’), the
‘father of the Turks,’ established the modern republic of Turkey, he was confronted with the task
of modernizing the language. It had no vocabulary for modern science and technology, was
written in an unsuitable Arabic orthography, and was strongly influenced by both Arabic and
Persian.
In 1928 Atatürk deliberately adopted the Roman script for his new modern Turkish. This
effectively cut the Turks off from their Islamic past and directed their attention toward both their
Turkish roots and their future as Turks in a modern world. Since only 10 percent of the
population was literate, there was no mass objection to the changes. It was possible to use the
new script almost immediately in steps taken to increase the amount of literacy in the country.

In the 1930s Atatürk promoted a further move away from Arabic and Persian in the development
of the new vocabulary that the language required in order to meet the needs of science and
technology. The ‘Sun Language Theory’ was developed, a theory which said that Turkish was
the mother tongue of the world and that, when Turkish borrowed from other languages, it was
really taking back what had originally been Turkish anyway. Some deliberate attempts were
made
to purify the language, but these were not very successful, and today Turkish is full of
borrowings, particularly from English, French, and other European languages. Corpus planning
was very effective for a while in bringing about a modernizing, secular-oriented Turkey.
However, it stagnated in the last decades of the twentieth century as problems arose with
defining a new Turkish identity: secular or religious, European or Asian, Western or Islamic.
(See Lewis, 1999,
and Dokançay-Aktuna, 2004, together with the rest of that issue of the International Journal of
the Sociology of Language for assessments of recent developments.)

In the former Soviet Union, there was a great amount of language planning dating from its very
founding, though not all of it was coherent or consistent. One of the most important policies was
Russification. Needless to say, in a state as vast as the Soviet Union, composed of approximately
100 different nations abilities, each with its own language or variety of a language, there were
several different aspects to such a policy. One of these was the elevation of regional and local
dialects into ‘languages,’ a policy of ‘divide and rule.’ Its goal was to prevent the formation of
large language blocks and also allow the central government to insist that Russian be used as a
lingua franca. It also led to the large number of languages that flourished in the Soviet Union.

While many local and regional languages were actively encouraged in the Soviet Union, so that
Russian itself could be legitimized as a lingua franca, a number of languages were banned from
support, e.g., Arabic, Hebrew, and German, since it was not deemed to be in the interests of the
state to support these. Russian was also promoted as a universal second language and as a
language of instruction in the schools. However, there was resistance in such areas as Georgia,
Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Baltic republics.
When the Soviet Union eventually fell into disarray at the end of the 1980s such policies had
interesting consequences. The Soviet Union had been organized internally by republics
constructed primarily on language and ethnicity. It proceeded to divide that way. For example,
Ukraine, even though the language itself and the people had been heavily Russified, became a
separate state. The Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania went their ways too.
Moldavia became Moldova and its Moldavian language was finally acknowledged to be what it
was, Romanian, and was renamed Moldavian–Romanian. Georgia, Armenia, and Kazakhstan
separated too and proclaimed Georgian, Armenian, and Kazakh as their national languages, even
though in the last case only 40 percent of the population were Kazakhs and 37 percent were
Russians. The Turkic-speaking republics, deliberate creations within the Soviet Union, also
separated and found their main linguistic problem to be how closely they should identify with
Turkey itself. Their abandonment of the Cyrillic script and choice of Roman scripts rather than
Arabic-Persian ones appears to indicate a close but secular relationship.

Finland is a very close, and sometimes uncomfortable, neighbor of both Russia and Sweden. In
the nineteenth century the Finns developed their language to differentiate themselves from both
the Russians and the Swedes by turning what was essentially an unwritten spoken language into
one with a writing system, literature, and the full panoply of uses that signify a standard
language.

This deliberate bit of corpus planning gave them a distinct language and reinforced the
differences they felt to exist between them and both Russians and Swedes, differences further
accentuated by the fact that Finnish belongs to an entirely different language family (Finno-
Ugric) from the other two languages (Indo-European).