The chapters in Part III are designed to apply the material presented thus far to a series of current and historical cases of language conflict and language rights issues. The cases presented in this part are organized according to an informal typology of language conflicts, which is designed to reveal and highlight similarities among conflicts that are distant in time and space, commonalities that might otherwise remain unnoticed.
Chapters 10 through 14 are named after the five categories of language conflict that comprise the typology: conflicts involving (i) indigenous minorities,Footnote 1 (ii) geopolitical minorities, (iii) migrant minorities, (iv) dialect minorities, and (v) competition for linguistic dominance. The disparate natures of these categories are mostly apparent from their names, but it is still worth spelling out what they mean in the context of this book.
Indigenous minority language conflict is, in our terms, an ethnolinguistic conflict involving some indigenous people and a dominant group that has settled in and appropriated their territory. The most salient example of this type of conflict would be that between English-speaking Americans/Canadians and the speakers of various tribal languages who were settled in North America long before the arrival of Europeans. Note that “indigenous” can be a relative term, and its application to a particular group occasionally open to debate. For instance, in our discussion of South Africa in Chapter 7, several waves of immigration and settlement were described, and one might contend that the Khoisan peoples were indigenous with respect to the Bantu incursion, that the Bantu were indigenous relative to the Dutch-speaking Boers, and that the Boers were indigenous in relation to the British. There is no clear demarcation that determines how long a group must reside in a territory before it can be considered indigenous to that territory, although one might expect at least a few hundred years of settlement for the term to be objectively applicable.
The category of “geopolitical minorities” is intended to describe situations in which linguistic conflicts arise as a consequence of changed borders. These border shifts may be the result of war and conquest, post-war treaties, political unifications, or political dissolutions. In all such cases, though, the outcome of interest is that one linguistic group suddenly finds itself a minority in a country dominated by another linguistic group, without having moved anywhere. A classic case of this sort would be the language conflict and language rights issues that arose for the Mexican (Spanish-speaking) settlers in California who were living in Mexico at the beginning of 1846, but were in newly acquired American territory by 1848. It should be noted that the role of geopolitical linguistic minority is not necessarily fixed. A minority in one era might become a majority in the next, as has happened in the case of Slovaks and Hungarians. The former were a geopolitical minority within the Kingdom of Hungary until the post-World War I partitioning of Hungary in 1921. Today, since its independence in 1992, the Hungarians of Slovakia have been a geopolitical minority in that country.
Migrant minority language conflicts are those that arise when an ethnolinguistic group (or individuals from that group) moves into a territory dominated by a linguistically distinct population. On this view, English-speaking Americans moving en masse to Ontario or Manitoba in Canada would not be a migrant linguistic minority, but such a group moving to French-speaking Quebec would be so. There is, furthermore, no statute of limitations on being part of a migrant minority, so long as the group maintains its ethnolinguistic character and does not assimilate. We would thus consider the descendants of Koreans who immigrated to Japan in 1910 to belong to a Korean migrant minority of Japan, so long as they continue to speak Korean, identify culturally and ethnically as Korean, and are subject to linguistic impediments by the dominant Japanese culture.
Dialect minorities are sometimes more difficult to identify, in part because it can sometimes be difficult to determine whether two groups speak different languages or different varieties (dialects) of the same language. This issue was discussed in some detail in Chapter 4. That said, there are altogether too many cases of groups’ speaking the “wrong” (i.e. stigmatized) variety of a language, and being punished (economically, socially, politically) for it. Individual cases of dialect minority language conflict are as varied as are the dialects themselves. There are instances in which a stigmatized dialect minority arises as the result of shifts in political power. For example, the western (‘Kansai’) dialects of Japanese maintained a good deal of prestige through the sixteenth century when Kyoto was the capital of Japan, and then became increasingly stigmatized as (first in 1603) the seat of government and (then in 1868) the emperor’s residence were moved to Tokyo. There are instances in which speakers of another language (e.g. Okinawans in Japan) are presumed to speak a (stigmatized) dialect (of Japanese) and made to suffer for it. There are instances wherein the variety of a language spoken by an ethnic or racial minority (e.g. African Americans) is especially stigmatized on account of a generally negative disposition toward the minority group itself, rather than on account of any objective features of the dialect.
The final category, “competition for linguistic dominance,” is reserved for cases in which two groups each hold sway in some region of a country, and their linguistic conflict is part of a struggle for the dominance of one group over the other, or a struggle on the part of one group for independence from the other. The French–English conflict in Canada generally and in Quebec specifically is a classic case of competition for linguistic dominance, and a determination of the winner in the conflict is dependent on how broadly or narrowly one defines the territorial space of the conflict. In Canada overall, it is apparent that English has won the day (even acknowledging accommodation to French) and that Canada is de facto an English-speaking country (60 percent of Canadians are English speakers, and over 95 percent outside the provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick). In Quebec Province though, French has won the competition, in that 80 percent of the residents are native speakers of French and 95 percent have it as a first or second language. In some cases, competition for dominance is resolved through legislation (as in Canada). Sometimes there is no resolution and the conflict continues as a stalemate (as in Belgium). In some instances, the competition leads to war (as happened in Sri Lanka).
It should be acknowledged again that these categories are provided as a matter of convenience, and as an informal but useful way of talking about language conflict. Furthermore, we would not expect that every case of language conflict would fit neatly into one or another of these categories. Many conflicts incorporate aspects of more than one category, and some conflicts might belong to one category at a particular moment in time and to a different category somewhat later. And some conflicts might, in certain areas and in certain contexts, belong to several categories at once. The ongoing language conflict between Spanish speakers in the United States and the dominant English-speaking culture is one such example. If we take the Spanish speakers of New Mexico, many of them descended from Spanish settlers when it was part of Mexico, we are looking at a geopolitical linguistic minority. But Mexicans living and working in Chicago would be classed as a migrant linguistic minority, and Puerto Ricans living in New York might be considered, to the extent that they have developed their own (stigmatized) dialect of English (a.k.a. Spanglish), to be a dialectal minority.
Each of the following five chapters will focus on one of the five language conflict categories, present the historical and linguistic background for two or three ethnolinguistic conflicts pertaining to that category, and examine the language rights issues that have arisen in each case. We will identify some commonalities arising from a comparison of cases within each. At the end of each chapter are short synopses of three additional cases that readers might explore on their own.
