For this assignment, you are being asked to write a short paper about some form of language policy – looking at issues learned about in class that have had some impact on you or your ancestors, your language (learning/use) goals, and your current beliefs about issues around some language policy. (e.g., should English be the de facto lingua franca of international commerce?), etc.

INTL101 – McIntosh Winter 2021 – Section IDs 33856-33863

INTL101 — Cult & Society/International Perspective
Linguistic Autobiography

For this assignment, you are being asked to write a short paper about some form of language policy –
looking at issues learned about in class that have had some impact on you or your ancestors, your language
(learning/use) goals, and your current beliefs about issues around some language policy. (e.g., should
English be the de facto lingua franca of international commerce?), etc.

Connect your experience as a user of one or more language to concepts covered throughout this course.
Think about how your experience as a speaker of a language (or languages) has been formed and about who
or what has been part of this formation. You should contextualize your experiences in the larger social
setting and explore how these experiences have shaped your own attitudes about language and language
policy. To do this, apart from your academic research, I encourage you to interview family members and
friends with whom you have grown up. Final version is due via TurnItIn March 10th by 11:59pm.

Requirements:

1. A thesis statement which connects your personal language experiences to at least ONE topic we
have discussed in class.

2. Develop the body of the paper connecting it to your topic and thesis statement – develop your thesis
and how that relates to at least THREE concepts covered in class.

3. A well-integrated reference to at least THREE sources (These should include concepts from the
class readings, discussions, and lectures.) Citing documentaries or lectures only count as one
citation.

4. Correct use of terms from class when appropriate (e.g., Speech Community, Classic language
planning, linguistic discrimination, Linguicide, mutual intelligibility, overt/covert prestige,
diglossia, etc…)

5. The paper should be clearly written, proofread, and no longer than 750 words.

Thesis statement
The thesis statement is the point of your paper; it should summarize how your personal experience relates
to course concepts. It should be clear, concise, and the body of your paper should support and connect to it.

Some generic examples:

• Language polies in my home country growing up affected attitudes about the status of my regional
variety motivated me to switch to the standard form after leaving home.

• My positive attitudes towards my heritage language allowed me to maintain it throughout my
adolescence.

• My family’s language use has been affected the top-down language policies enacted in my home
country, as we have shifted from our heritage language, spoken by my grandparents, to only
speaking (insert language).

• Being part of the Tagalog speech community helped my family to maintain the language despite
subtractive bilingual education programs I experience growing up.

• My school had a subtractive bilingual program, so we switched from Chinese to English medium
instruction by the 8th grade.

• Much like other heritage speakers, I have limited literacy in my heritage language, but I can be
mistaken for a monolingual Hindi speaker under the right circumstances.

• Going to Saturday School helped me become literate in my heritage language despite being
schooled in an English-Only environment.

INTL101 – McIntosh Winter 2021 – Section IDs 33856-33863

References & Use of Terms from Class
The references should be to academic papers, material we read or watched in class, or other sources (not
Wikipedia or Google). You may cite the lecture slides or documentaries shown in class, however, this will
only count as ONE reference. If the reference is a non-academic source, like a video about language
attitudes or a blog post, you should justify its use i.e.: “This quote is representative about attitudes towards
language policy in the Philippines”. You do not need to cite the terms we learned in class unless you are
referencing a particular reading.

By “well-integrated” I mean that the source should be relevant, and it should demonstrate or add
information which helps to contextualize or better understand your own experience. The source should
support your main and/or sub- points of your paper’s thesis. Please meet with us during office hours, during
your sessions with your TA or email us for clarifications about your final draft.

If you are trying to find more information about a language or language variety that you speak, there are
many great online resources, including the World Atlas of Languages – https://wals.info/, Glottolog –
https://glottolog.org, Ethnologue – https://www.ethnologue.com/ and North American English Dialects –
https://aschmann.net/AmEng/. (be sure you ar logged into the UCSD VPN to access Ethnologue)

Style and clarity

• Use of APA style is required for references. Although nice to include, a title page and abstract
are OPTIONAL for this paper. If you need writing assistance, please seek help from the Teaching
& Learning Commons. (you should do this sooner than later as appointments full up quickly at the
end of the quarter – If you can’t get help there at the very least have one of your colleagues
proofread your paper before you turn it in.) All papers are to be word-processed, proofread, and
solely the work of the author. (References do not count towards the overall word limit.)

• Though the paper need not be written in a very formal register, please conform to Standard English.

The writing should be clear and proofread – Please seek help from the Teaching & Learning
Commons for help on your final draft.

For Interviewing family members/friends
• Interviews (though not required) should help to add context to your paper’s thesis. If you decide to

use interviews, please come up with some questions ahead of time and use the same set with each
person. You should submit your questions (not the actual interview) as an appendix in your final
paper. (The appendix goes at the very end of the paper after the reference list.) Please meet with
us or email us if you have any queries about the interview or paper format. (interview questions do
not count towards the overall word limit.)

78

The dissolution of the European colonial empires in the second half of
the twentieth century resulted in another postwar period where many
new states were constituted. Liberation movements invoked the ideal
of the nation in the fight against the colonial powers and, when they
gained independence, took the nation state as the model for sovereign
statehood. Although the leaders of the newly liberated countries were
in very different settings from their counterparts in the earlier waves
of nation state formation, the basic problems were felt to be much the
same. On the linguistic and cultural front, the challenges were the ever
intractable issues: how to achieve national unity, how to ensure inde-
pendence, and how to educate the national population effectively.

4.1 The legacy of the colonial period

It may well turn out that Europe’s most enduring legacy to the regions
it colonised in the rest of the world will be the tradition of the nation
state as an organising principle. This form of political organisation
was inherited, however, by groups where there was little cultural and
linguistic cohesion or other factor that could be employed in an ethnic
construction of nationality. As we have seen in previous chapters, there
was rarely neat coincidence of ‘nation’ and state in Europe. But what
was already fiction in Europe became doubly so in postcolonial Africa
and Asia.

In postcolonial Africa, there was extreme heterogeneity within
states and arbitrary borders between them. The imperial delegates to

4
Nation Building in the Wake of
Colonialism: Old Concepts in
New Settings

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 79

late nineteenth-century conferences had carved Africa up according
to the power balances among European states and drawn state bound-
aries that were often geometric and that rarely took notice of ethnic
groupings. The rationale for borders was simply that competing
colonial powers were blocked in their advance by each other; ‘they
reflect spheres of influence and trade carved out by the precursors of
European colonialism’ (Fardon and Furniss 1994: 11). In consequence,
societies that had been highly unified in terms of language and culture
were divided and groups that were immensely disparate were joined
together.

Despite this, after independence, there was no move to redraw the
map. The member states of the Organisation of African Unity agreed
to live with their boundaries. But, although these frontiers were main-
tained, they were highly contentious, since they left governments with
disparate linguistic populations within their borders and a high risk of
irredentism where groups that had been dissected desired to regroup.
Independence from colonial rule gave the African continent a mosaic of
states that its autochthonous inhabitants had never willed and borders
that they had never contributed to drawing.

Federalism and loose association would perhaps have been the best
resolution in many cases, but the majority of newly independent states
did not make that choice, instituting instead regimes where power was
concentrated in the capital and where the people were treated as a single
group. The nineteenth-century European model of political organisa-
tion, which promoted the ideas of a single unified group on a single
territory, total sovereignty and self-reliance, was immensely influential.
This was a logical development in many ways since anti-colonial libera-
tion movements had adopted nationalist ideology as a mobilising force
and retained the philosophy after independence as the founding prin-
ciple for the state (Nyerere 1999).

The end of empire thus left many governments in the same position
as the state nations of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries; that is, they had fixed boundaries, heterogeneous populations and
centralised political systems. Rulers and governments saw a pressing
need to unite their populations and mould a more homogenous citi-
zenry. The nation state was the normative response. Planning for unity
was undertaken consciously and in haste. The difficulties inherent in
introducing the old ideal of ‘one people, one language, one state’ into
the kind of diversity described above did not stop politicians from
trying.

80 Language Policy and Language Planning

This one party, one language, one nation project was thus typical of
nation building in the postcolonial period. Bamgbose has categorised it
in the African situation as ‘obsession with the number one’:

It seems that we are obsessed with the number ‘one’. Not only must
we have one national language, we must have a one party system.
The mistaken belief is that in such oneness of language or party we
would achieve socio-cultural cohesion and political unity in our
multi-ethnic, multilingual and multicultural societies. (Bamgbose
1994: 36)

4.2 The single ‘national’ language

Finding the one language that would purportedly promote unity and
solidarity within the state was not a simple task. The heterogeneity
of the populations presented no simple indigenous solution. In some
states there were literally hundreds of different languages. Indonesia,
one of the most linguistically diverse states in Asia, has more than
719 languages. 1 Nigeria, one of the most linguistically diverse states in
Africa, has an estimated 400 languages (Elugbe 1994). 2 In both Nigeria
and the Indonesian archipelago the languages are spread across different
language phyla which means that, although there are dialect continua
where some mutual comprehension is possible, on the cleavages between
phyla there is no possibility of passive understanding. Even within phyla,
speakers may not necessarily achieve comprehension through mutual
passive understanding. 3 Indonesia and Nigeria may be extreme cases of
diversity, but most African and Asian postcolonial states are linguisti-
cally heterogeneous to some degree.

From the perspective of governments, the case for rationalisation was
not difficult to make. Faced with extreme multilingualism, recognition
of the rights of citizens to use their language in public life, in partic-
ular their interaction with state institutions, was considered unfeasible.
Pluralism was blocked, practically, by the logistics of implementing
policy and, psychologically and ideologically, by commitment to the
nation state model. Post-independence ethos was firmly against recog-
nition of ethnic diversity. The identification of cultural and linguistic
difference was seen as retrograde, a pandering to a ‘tribalism’ that had
to be transcended in the modern state. In contrast, the embedding of
different ‘tribes’ and groups into the nation was seen as progressive.
There was optimism that this could be done through commitment to

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 81

nationalist ideology, the charisma of the new leaders and universal
education, all of which would provide ‘the nurturing for the integrated
growth of these new nation states’ (Laitin 1992: 8).

The third argument against multilingualism was that it was antithet-
ical to development and economic growth. Research had been produced
which suggested that states that were highly heterogeneous in terms of
language were characterised by low or very low per capita GNP (Banks
and Textor 1963). Pool (1972: 216) reported the general view of the
period that ‘language diversity breaks down occupational mobility and
thus slows development’. 4

Multilingualism was also held to be unworkable if the aims of basic
education and literacy for all were to be met. Sub-Saharan African
languages had not generally been written down until contact with
Europeans (Mazrui and Mazrui 1998) 5 and, therefore, producing basic
teaching materials in the vernaculars depended on whether they had
undergone what Charles Ferguson (1968) has termed graphisation.
Only some of the vast number of languages had been codified, given
an alphabet and elaborated so that they could function as media for
modern education systems. It would be a mammoth task to under-
take provision of teaching in every mother tongue (Ansre 1970; Elugbe
1994). 6

In their introductions to policy statements and constitutions, govern-
ments may have lauded the linguistic skill of multilinguals coping with
numerous languages in their daily encounters (Fardon and Furniss 1994),
but they took little notice of this multilingualism in the substance of their
laws which were aimed at national integration and efficiency through the
imposition of a national language. The ethos was for national unity, and
multilingualism was seen to be promoting what divided the nation and
held it back from development and modernity and was rejected. Thus, in
the early days of independence, no state made provision for bureaucratic
and political interaction or education to be in all the language varieties
found on the territory or even envisaged doing so.

Within the framework of wanting to designate one official language for
a multilingual population, the problem then became the actual choice of
language. There was always the possibility of using the language of the
former colonial power. Supporters claimed that it was both neutral and
provided a link with the wider world. Such a choice was, of course, prob-
lematic. 7 The former colonial language could not be indexical in the way
that is desired for national languages. The proposition was anathema to
those who wanted to break with the colonial past. According to many

82 Language Policy and Language Planning

who were looking for a new beginning, the imposition of the colonial
language had already inculcated a sense of inferiority:

The language of an African child’s formal education was foreign.
The language of the books he read was foreign. Thought in him
took the visible form of a foreign language … (The) colonial child
was made to see the world and where he stands in it as seen and
defined by or reflected in the culture of the language of imposition.
(Ngugi 1986: 17)

To continue to use the language of that colonialism was to ensure a
continued sense of inferiority.

Nonetheless, the government of many postcolonial states did just this.
But most states were in a bind; their heterogeneity appeared to allow
them no other solution than the language of the colonial power that
had brought them together and their espousal of nationalist ideology
meant that the pressure to find a single national language was strong.
The former colonial powers backed this solution since it kept their lines
of contact and influence open. The English lobby argued that English
could be adopted as:

a politically neutral language beyond the reproaches of tribalism.
(Moorhouse (1964) cited in Mazrui and Tidy 1984: 299)

The promoters of French argued that:

French finds favours among the people because it does not advantage
any ethnic group. (Daff 1991: 152, my translation)

The British press found it ‘remarkable that English has not been rejected
as a symbol of colonialism’ (Moorhouse (1964) cited in Mazrui and Tidy
1984: 299). The French were equally self-congratulatory (Conac et al.
1987). These reactions rather ignore the fact that given the disparate
populations left by colonialism no other solution readily presented itself
to a would be unitary state. 8 The adoption of English and French can be
best explained as the least bad solution in the circumstances rather than
by any claim that they could be politically neutral.

Finding a national language from the country’s own tradition that
would not promote the interests of one group over the others was the
ideal solution. Ansre, writing just after decolonisation and at the time

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 83

of the great language debate, noted that the ideal in the search for the
single national language would be to identify one that was:

indigenous because it can then engender a sense of national pride,
facilitate the promotion of the indigenous cultural heritage and
provide a certain amount of loyalty at the emotional level. (Ansre
1970: 2–3)

The revolutionary and socialist figures in decolonisation favoured this
solution. Frantz Fanon stressed the link between language and culture:

To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp
the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to
assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilisation. (Fanon 1967:
17–18)

Ngugi (1986) taking a very Whorfian position, argued the corollary
of this. He maintained that those Africans who forsook their mother
tongue for English or French would be inevitably Westernised. The alien
language would carry alien ideologies.

Choosing this ideal national language remained the problem. The
languages of the larger groups were rejected as official languages of
power as their adoption would have fuelled fear of domination and
caused rejection of the unitary state. The ‘national’ language had to be
one that would be acceptable to all sections of the ‘nation’. Few states
had any ready-made solution.

In both Tanzania and Indonesia, however, there was such a language
that could be employed for the purpose. These countries had three
linguistic influences from which to draw: the indigenous languages, the
language of an earlier regional power and the language of the European
colonial period. The languages of the earlier regional power, Kiswahili in
Tanzania and Malay in Indonesia, seemed to fit all the requirements for a
national language. They were indigenous and so would have a symbolic
dimension that would signal a new beginning after colonialism. They
were not the languages of any politically prominent single ethnic group
and so could promote unity within the state. They would foster a distinct
identity on a regional basis since they were both regional lingua francas.
They were languages with historical links that could be used to build
a sense of national belonging and continuity. The only serious disad-
vantage was that they would need to be imposed by planning diktat,

84 Language Policy and Language Planning

top-down, since they were not spoken by the majority of future citizens,
but as this was a time of general optimism and belief in technocratic
solutions this was not held to be an insuperable difficulty.

The new nation states of Africa and Asia became the laboratory for
conscious language planning with a mushrooming of university and
policy groups committed to explaining how it could be done. Scholarly
teams from Western universities (Fishman, Ferguson, Das Gupta 1968;
Jernudd and Rubin 1971; Fishman 1974; etc.) analysed the experiences
of the recent European nation building past and employed the knowl-
edge to suggest frameworks for the postcolonial nation building future.
They were quite optimistic that language change could be orchestrated:

Planning includes indicative, regulative, productive and promotional
functions. The indicative aspect of language planning consists of
assessing the language situation in terms of social developmental
requirements and prescribing certain courses of change. The regu-
lative aspect calls for authoritative action in the form of public
measures accompanied by sanctions for encouraging specific uses
of selected languages for defined domains. The productive aspect
attends to the task of developing the capacity of a language to
cope with the increasing demands likely to be made on it from the
domains … Planning authorities are likely to engage in active promo-
tion of the products and standards among the potential user publics,
including the administrative, educational, news media and other
modes of language use. (Das Gupta and Ferguson 1977: 5)

Language planning scholars stretched along a continuum of opinion
from those who believed that a decision could be taken centrally and
imposed top-down through education to those who began to wonder
whether language practice could be influenced greatly at all. Jernudd
and Rubin posed the question (1971) ‘can language be planned?’ and
concluded that some studies ‘convincingly show the absence of plan-
ning from language planning’ (Jernudd and Das Gupta 1971: 201).
Haugen (1966) reported the incremental force of individual decisions
and suggested that top-down policy only succeeds when bottom-up
patterns of behaviour are (or can be brought to be) in accord with it. 9
Other scholars and most policy makers were less cautious; they believed
that language policy could be introduced top-down through the agen-
cies of the state and citizens persuaded of the utility of the rationalisa-
tion. Ansre records the advice contemporary policy groups were giving:

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 85

For the purpose of national unity and progress it is necessary to have
a language or major languages which can be used widely throughout
the country not only so that government can communicate with
the governed, but also that it could serve as the medium of national
interaction at all levels. Governments are, therefore, exhorted to
formulate and implement language policies for the nation as a whole.
(Ansre 1970: 2)

The political elites in both Tanzania and Indonesia instigated language
planning on all the formal levels (status, corpus and acquisition) and
engaged in a massive ideological campaign to convert the ‘nation’ to the
national language. Formal language planning institutes continued the
work on codification, standardisation and elaboration. The following
sections narrate how partial success was achieved in each country and
explain why that success was never more than partial.

4.3 Language planning in Tanzania: the introduction of
Kiswahili

Tanzania came into existence on 26 April 1964, when Tanganyika united
with Zanzibar to form the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar,
renamed the United Republic of Tanzania on 29 October. Tanganyika
had first been a German colony, and then, after the First World War,
control of most of the territory passed to the United Kingdom under a
League of Nations mandate. After the Second World War, Tanganyika
became a UN trust territory under British control. In 1961, Tanganyika
became an independent state under the presidency of Julius Nyerere.

Zanzibar came under Portuguese domination in the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries but was retaken by Omani Arabs in the
early eighteenth century. The Anglo-German agreement of 1890 made
Zanzibar and Pemba a British protectorate which the British ruled
through the sultan. Zanzibar gained independence from Britain on
10 December 1963. One month later, the sultan of Zanzibar was over-
thrown and replaced by representatives of the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP)
with Karume as its head of state. Karume signed an Act of Union with
Nyerere and the two countries combined later that year to form the
modern state of Tanzania.

Tanzania’s 1964 frontiers brought together a number of dispa-
rate groups: tribes that were still hunter-gatherers; nomadic herders;
a large, illiterate peasantry; seafaring traders; a sophisticated urban

86 Language Policy and Language Planning

intelligentsia. They also aggregated more than 120 ethnic groups with
different cultures and languages. The larger groups (the Sukuma, Haya,
Nyakyusa, Nyamwezi and Chaga have more than one million members)
are Bantu-speaking peoples. Speakers of Nilotic or related languages
include the nomadic Masai and the Luo, whose territory straddles the
border with Kenya, thus dividing their populations between different
states. Two small groups speak languages of the Khoisan family peculiar
to the Bushman and Hottentot peoples. Cushitic speaking peoples, orig-
inally from the Ethiopian highlands, are also present on the territory.
Much of the African population on Zanzibar came from the mainland.
The Shirazis, however, trace their origins to the island’s early Persian
settlers. The small Asian community includes Hindus, Sikhs, Shi’a and
Sunni Muslims and Goan Catholics.

In the first decade after independence Nyerere’s vision was an inclu-
sive, secular non-racial nation state (Brennan 2012), unified through
shared civic values and coalescing around a common national culture
based on the ‘best of the traditions and customs of all the tribes’ (Nyerere
1967: 187). The Arusha Declaration of 1967 introduced the policy of
Ujamaa (familyhood) and sought to apply socialist principles to the
African context. This included a one-party system, with the democratic
structure of competing interest groups rejected as divisive.

4.3.1 Kiswahili in the pre-independence era

In 1964 Tanzanians possessed an indigenous candidate for the role of offi-
cial national language. This was Kiswahili 10 a Bantu language, from the
north-east branch of the phylum (Hinnebusch et al. 1981) with a signifi-
cant proportion of lexis taken from Arabic along with some features of
pronunciation. It was a language associated with the Islamic tradition
(similar to Hausa, Fulfude and Mandinka in west Africa and Somali and
Nubi in other parts of east Africa) and with earlier conquests of east
Africa (Mazrui and Mazrui 1998). It had become the mother tongue of
the peoples of the coastal strip, a predominantly Muslim population
(Ansre 1974). In addition, over the centuries the language had also acted
as the language of commercial relations, accompanying trade inland,
as far as the great lakes of Central Africa and beyond. At independence
Kiswahili seemed a suitable choice for national language since its base
was Bantu which made it an accessible medium for the 94 per cent of
the population whose languages are Bantu related (Whiteley 1971).
By 1964, the memory of the pre-European colonial hierarchies which
had Arab or Shirazi at the top of the status tree had generally faded.
Moreover, the language had some prestige; the Kiswahili-speaking group

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 87

on the coast was generally accepted as the comparatively high status,
urban and cosmopolitan section of Tanzanian society (Mamdani 1996).

There were also other reasons to choose Kiswahili. It was already the
established language of much bureaucracy having been used in state
institutions throughout the colonial period. The German colonial
administrators had adopted the regional lingua franca as the language
of contact with the populations they ruled in east Africa, rejecting the
other two possible media for communication: the local languages were
too numerous and each group of speakers too small for the contact role
(Whiteley 1971); the colonial language was little used for intergroup
contact as both the Germans and the British, who replaced them after
the First World War, subscribed to a doctrine of distinction and Kiswahili
served as a way of keeping the African population and the colonial class
separate (Ansre 1974). 11 This was most evident in the three-tiered educa-
tion system developed in British East African territories, with Kiswahili
medium education from 1925. Those of the autochthonous population
who had gone through primary education had done so in Kiswahili
(Mazrui and Mazrui 1995). There had been a separate system for both
British and the Asians.

Although originally associated with Islam, Kiswahili had also gradu-
ally become the medium for Christian missionary work. Its adoption
was uneven since some missionaries were opposed to Kiswahili because
of its associations with Islam and some churches adopted local languages
as a surer way of making contact with those they wished to convert
(Whiteley 1971). However, Kiswahili had slowly gained ground in the
second half of the nineteenth century. The codification of the language
proved problematic. That traditional agent of standardisation, the trans-
lation of the Bible, was less influential than it had been in European
settings, because the translator, a Lutheran called Pastor Roehl, not only
came from outside the Kiswahili speech community but also set out to
purge the language used in the translation of all Arabic influence. This
purism imposed from outside, for religious purposes, was ill received.
The resulting text was difficult to recognise as a written version of the
varieties of Kiswahili actually spoken and Ansre reports: ‘that native
Swahili speakers who heard Roehl’s variety always asked: “Where is this
Swahili spoken?”’ (Ansre 1974: 384).

In order for the Kiswahili to be used in the colonial education system,
European linguists undertook codification and standardisation in the
1920s and 1930s. 12 Again local spoken varieties differed greatly from the
written form, and again the standard was not universally recognised or
accepted by mother tongue speakers (Ansre 1974). 13 A further difficulty

88 Language Policy and Language Planning

was the existence of two ways to write Kiswahili: those educated in
mission schools were literate in the Roman script and those educated in
the Muslim tradition learnt to write Kiswahili in Arabic.

Some of the other factors noted in the spread of European national
languages were also at work for Kiswahili. As rural Tanzanians moved
to the towns they learnt Kiswahili, coalescing around the Kiswahili-
speaking nodes in the coastal towns. Those who had been in the British
army had also tended to acquire Kiswahili, which was the lingua franca
of East African regiments. Soldiers became competent and sometimes
literate in it, particularly those who fought in the Second World War
(Hanley 1946).

4.3.2 Kiswahili and Ujamaa

The spread of Kiswahili was ensured in the 1950s 14 when it became the
language of political mobilisation against colonialism. TANU (Tanganyika
African National Union), the main organisation of the Tanganyikan
independence movement, used it as its medium from its founding in
1954 onwards. Thus by independence ‘Kiswahili had already acquired
the status of a party or national language’ (Whiteley 1971: 146) and
was thereafter associated with the socialist ideology of Nyerere. After
independence, Kiswahili was the language in which Ujamaa 15 policies
were introduced; the language and the political ideology reinforced
each other. The introduction of Kiswahili as the national language in
1966 has been described as: ‘an ideological imperative inducing a state
of mind towards the language as one of the behavioral corollaries of the
national ethos’ (Whiteley 1971: 151).

Interestingly for a language that was being promoted as a national
symbol, it was also presented as a language of Africa. This was consonant
with Nyerere’s stance as the great supporter of pan-Africanism. Whiteley
records how Kiswahili was promoted on several accounts: its African
pedigree, its role as the medium of mobilisation against colonialism, its
indexical function as the language of freedom, socialism and the nation.
He notes that the Tanzanians were exhorted to:

use Swahili on such grounds as ‘it is an African language’, ‘it played
a crucial role in our struggle for independence’, ‘it is shameful to
use the language of the colonialists and neo-colonialists’ or ‘it is the
language of the people’. (Whiteley 1971: 151)

Kiswahili thus spread to become the language of the public space
in Tanzania principally because it was the medium for a political

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 89

philosophy that had a degree of acceptance, and vice versa (Blommaert
1994b). Ujamaa mobilisation of a majority of the country could not
have happened without Kiswahili, the national language as symbol and
medium (Mazrui and Mazrui 1998). Language engineering always has
greater chance of success where there is ideological underpinning for new
patterns of language use. Certainly, the Tanzanian government achieved
a considerable degree of political participation through Kiswahili in the
first 20 years after independence. Politics conducted through Kiswahili
meant that a wider group could contribute than in countries which had
retained the colonial language as the language of government 16 (Mazrui
and Mazrui 1998). Education for self-sufficiency through Kiswahili also
ensured a more democratic distribution of knowledge than in the post-
colonial education systems where English and French continued to be
the medium of primary schools (Blommaert 1994b; Mafu 2001).

Tanzania has been a comparatively stable state compared to many
other postcolonial states and in some senses this is an indication that
nation building policies, including the spread of the national language,
were largely successful. Nyerere (1999), himself, claimed that language
had played a key role in the cohesion and stability he achieved:

The Arusha Declaration and our democratic single-party system,
together with our national language, Kiswahili, and a highly politi-
cized and disciplined national army, transformed more than 126
different tribes into a cohesive and stable nation.

We can agree with Nyerere that one of the factors that allowed Tanzania
to avoid tribal confrontation was the existence of a language sufficiently
wide spread and well-rooted to provide a home-grown language for
national integration. If we were to stop this account of language plan-
ning for national cohesion in Tanzania 20 years after independence, it
would be possible to present Kiswahilisation as a successful intervention
in the nation building tradition and contrast it with what happened in
Kenya and Uganda where English persisted and vertical integration was
not so far advanced (Bratt Paulston 1992). Many commentators contend
that Kiswahilisation held ethnic and religious divisions in check for
40 years (e.g. Gasarasi 1990).

4.3.3 Changing economic contexts and the language of
education

However, as the Tanzanian story unfolds it becomes clear that the intro-
duction of Kiswahili as a national language was not unproblematic.

90 Language Policy and Language Planning

One of the sites of difficulty was education reform. Within the context
of Ujamaa, an education policy based on socialist principles ( Elimu
ya Kujitegemea or education for self-reliance) aimed to provide educa-
tion for all at primary level and for adults who were illiterate. Literacy
programmes for adults were staffed in part by young activists sent into
rural Tanzania to establish Kiswahili as both the medium for informa-
tion on new agricultural methods, health issues and political education,
and a language whose acquisition in both its written and spoken forms
signalled commitment to the nation and the Ujamaa project. Educational
material promoting new ideas on the production of maize, wheat, rice,
cotton, cattle or fishing and on political education was produced in
Kiswahili (Buchert 1994). The primary programme was staffed too by
militants and idealists. However, the policy proved difficult to imple-
ment throughout the country and to sustain. Nyerere (1999) may have
claimed near universal literacy and primary school attendance but this
was never fully achieved (fieldwork interviews in Morogoro 2002). The
money for education was difficult to find in a society where the prime
needs of food, water, health and shelter could not be met for all the
population.

Moreover, democratisation of education did not go all the way. The
Kiswahilisation of secondary and higher education did not take place,
and courses continued to be delivered through the medium of English
and to an elite minority (Blommaert 1994a; Mafu 2001). This inevitably
produced some stratification with a minority, mainly the children of
the urban middle and upper classes, educated through English, and a
majority taught in Kiswahili. A binary divide continued to exist.

When it became clear that Ujamaa was ultimately not able to deliver
economic prosperity, the Tanzanians abandoned socialist solutions. In
the late 1970s and 1980s Tanzania was desperately poor and the govern-
ment turned to external bodies for assistance. As they accepted foreign
aid and investment, the Tanzanians came under external pressures for
economic and political reform. Lip service was still paid to socialism and
the policies designed to foster self-reliance, equality and national iden-
tity, but the impact of the structural adjustment programmes imposed
by such investors as the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund, were at odds with Ujamaa philosophy (Buchert 1994). The major
volte-face was the change from a state dominated socialist economic
system to a market economy with a blending of public and private
enterprise. 17

This new direction had an immediate impact on education. The
emphases on mass education in Kiswahili, on widening access, on

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 91

increasing equality and fostering social cohesion, which were the mark
of the Ujamaa period, waned. In their place, the goal of the education
service became the development of excellence in science, technology
and vocational training as a means of modernising and developing the
country. Such education was not for all, and the creation of a small,
qualified, technical and commercial elite became the focus. The concern
was no longer to expand and democratise education but to ensure high
standards for a limited group. There was no significant expansion of
secondary education and the language of provision remained English. It
continued to be only a minority that progressed from primary. Both the
language in which secondary education was delivered and the limited
number of places available ensured this (Blommaert 1994a; Mafu 2001).
The World Bank and the IMF had reinforced the decision to postpone
the planned Kiswahilisation of secondary education, by making clear
their preference for English (Mazrui 1997). Widespread English compe-
tence had practical advantages for them and, as Mazrui suspects, there
was probably an ideological dimension to the pressure. As aid was
an increasing component of the education budget, the cash-strapped
Tanzanians 18 felt they had little choice but to concur.

Among sociolinguists and planners the early euphoria evaporated.
The flow of papers from the 1970s that stressed the relationship between
language planning and national development, language acquisition
and national cohesion began to dry up in the national language policy
and planning literature (Blommaert 1994a). The spread of Kiswahili,
the motor of national development and the language of liberation and
Africanhood, appeared to have stalled, as English remained the language
which allowed access to secondary and higher education. A period of
austerity meant that education budgets had to be slashed, and literacy
and school attendance declined sharply (Danish Ministry of Foreign
Affairs 2002; Ministry of Education and Culture 2000). The proportion
of government spending devoted to education fell from 11.7 per cent
in 1980–81 to 2.5 per cent in 1995–96 (United Nations 2000). School
attendance had already fallen from 70 per cent in the early 1980s to
60 per cent in the late 1980s (Buchert 1994). Buchert also reports that
adult literacy is likely to have fallen in the period 1980–94, suggesting
that, the idealism of Ujamaa that linked literacy with political educa-
tion and social change had disappeared. The young activists who had
breathed life into the scheme were replaced with teachers doing paid
overtime and without the same motivation or time to commit to the
activity. The learners too had different motivations; increasingly literacy
and education came to be seen as the means for individuals to improve

92 Language Policy and Language Planning

their economic situation rather than as giving value to the community.
The vertical integration of the population that had started to occur, with
Kiswahili as part of the process, was slowing.

State schools came under attack for having unsuitable curricula. The
number of teachers was inadequate and many of them were poorly
trained (Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2002; Qorro 2013). The
urban middle class was increasingly dissatisfied with the public educa-
tion system. Once the barriers to private schooling were removed in
the 1980s, large numbers of private academies were set up (Lassibille
et al. 2000). Even at primary level these schools were English medium
or placed a heavy emphasis on English (Boyle 1999; Mafu 2001) and
charged a rate that was out of reach of all but a very narrow elite class
( Tanzanian Observer 12/01/03, p. 3).

In the state sector, the full commitment to free and compulsory
education for 7–13 year olds made in the 1978 Education Act was
abandoned. Parents were asked to pay fees and other school related
costs that had once been assumed by the government. The fall in
school enrolment was inevitable and the government had to recon-
sider the policy in 2002. However, only primary school was made free
for all; there were still fees for secondary and tertiary levels (Vavrus
2002) which exacerbated the binary divide between the basic level
of education (potentially) for all in Kiswahili and the secondary fee-
paying level with instruction in English for a small minority. As Mazrui
and Mazrui (1995) point out, English medium was not necessarily
intended as elite closure, but, associated as it is with fee-paying, it had
that effect in both the public and private education systems. The strati-
fication of education increased: the young of the rich were educated
through English from kindergarten to secondary; the children of the
majority were taught in Kiswahili in underfunded public schools; the
very poorest received no education at all.

The national economic situation gradually improved following
the macro-economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. In the twenty-
first century, GDP growth continued to improve and in 2005 reached
6.8 percent, although half of the population continued to live in abso-
lute poverty: 57.8 percent of Tanzanian people survived on less than
US$1 a day and 89.9 percent lived on less than US$2 a day (UNDP 2006:
294). This poverty diminished slowly, moving from 34 per cent of the
population on $1 a day in 2007 to 28 per cent in 2012. However, the
number of very poor people in Tanzania remains significant, and, against
a background of gradually increasing economic growth, inequality has
increased.

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 93

The situation for education is complex. On the positive side there were
some legacies from the Ujamaa period, for example, an adult literacy
rate of 69.4 percent in 2006, which was higher than for much of the
Sub-Saharan region, and other countries with similar levels of income or
human development (UNDP 2006). In 2006, 78 per cent of youth aged
15 to 24 were literate. The Tanzanians are committed to education and
attendance in primary education exploded in Tanzania in the 2000s,
after the implementation of the Primary Education Development Plan.
African Development Bank (2011) figures showed a rise from 59 per cent
enrolment in 2000 to 95.4 per cent enrolment in 2010. However, there
is a negative side too. Many of those enrolled did not go on to the final
years of basic education. The World Bank (2015) noted that Tanzania
was failing its Millennium Development Goal on school completion
rates. In secondary and higher education participation is also problem-
atic. The African Development Bank figures for 2009 (2011) show that
less than a third of Tanzanians progress past the very basic primary level
of education. Only a tiny proportion of Tanzanians proceed to higher
education. The African Development Bank (2011) reported ‘deteriorating
educational quality’ in the secondary and higher education sectors.

The government thus faced several challenges in the secondary and
higher education sector. The most important was to increase participa-
tion. The challenges here were, of course, principally economic. Even
where secondary education is free there are still opportunity costs
involved in sending older children to school; the young of the very
poorest are effectively deschooled by urban or rural poverty. However,
low enrolment may also stem from language issues. A number of studies
record that pupils taught through the medium of Kiswahili in primary
do not make the move to English medium easily at the beginning of
secondary, and that deficient English language skills are still an issue in
higher education (Qorro 2013).

The ministry of education has adopted two widely different policy
approaches. In 2009 the ministry proposed that state schools copy the
private sector and increase English as the medium of instruction from
nursery onwards. This provoked an outcry among educationalists who
argued that English was not sufficiently anchored in Tanzanian society
and that teaching content through imperfectly mastered English was at
the root of many educational problems. As Qorro (2013: 16) argued: ‘In
order for the majority of Tanzanian people to participate meaningfully
in education, that education has to be in a language they understand’.

A set of very poor examination results in 2013 led to a reassess-
ment of the situation. The government appeared to be listening to the

94 Language Policy and Language Planning

pro-Kiswahili education lobby and took a diametrically opposing line
to the 2009 policy. The new initiative was launched by the president
himself. In February 2015, Jakaya Kikwete announced that basic educa-
tion would be extended from seven years to 11 years, that it would be
free and that it would be in Kiswahili. In 2015 the plan was to make
Tanzanian secondary schools Kiswahili medium.

Thus the Tanzanians seem to have returned, at least in intention, to
the era of bold solutions, the choice of a single African language in order
to pursue the goal of national unity. This is surprising since as Fardon
and Furniss (1994: 13) commented such policy had ‘generally been aban-
doned as impractical or self-defeating in its own terms’. It is, of course,
too early to make any comment on the implementation of the policy, or
indeed whether it will endure. The discussion boards of the Tanzanian
media suggest that the citizenry is very divided. Some posts reveal the
relentless antipathy to further Kiswahilisation of education among the
middle classes that has been apparent for decades (c.f. Mafu 2001).
Those whose children attend state secondary schools feel that English
gives them the advantage Bourdieu (1982) defined as cultural capital
and they do not want to lose this. 19 Some point out that secondary
education in Kiswahili is still education through a second language; not
all Tanzanians are WaKiswahili (Kiswahili speakers) despite claims to the
contrary. Kiswahili has not replaced local languages outside the main
urban areas. Some point out that it will take years to replace English
medium teaching materials with Kiswahili and that there will be a
constant need to translate to keep abreast of developments. In the other
camp some see the reform as an attempt to make secondary education
available to all and to get better results from the process. Some feel some
patriotic pleasure in a return to the Ujamaa policy. Some suggest that
English as an auxiliary langue is not as useful as it once was; the pres-
ence of so many immigrants, investors and collaborators from China
means that some Tanzanians are reconsidering which is the most useful
auxiliary language in Tanzania in 2015.

4.3.4 Conclusions

There are thus alternative assessments of the efforts of the Tanzanian
language policy makers and planners to impose Kiswahili top-down on
a diverse population in order to encourage feelings of national unity and
solidarity.

A generally negative view dominated the literature and political discourse
at the turn of the millennium. In this assessment, Kiswahilisation was
seen to be a failure. The lack of an expansive economy to pay the social

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 95

costs of national integration had brought about a discrepancy between
formulated and implemented policies in Tanzania. Rather than growing
at a rate that could cover costs, the economy had contracted under
pressures from internal problems and external forces. 20 It had simply
not been possible to pay for the educational policies to ensure cohesive
national development in Tanzania. Thus society fractured linguistically;
elite education through English ring fenced many professional openings
and economic opportunities for the Anglophone upper classes.

A more positive view of national language planning has since resur-
faced, taking the line that the Kiswahilisation policy achieved a limited
success on its own terms. Status planning worked in so far as Kiswahili
became the language of the state institutions and the language that citi-
zens mostly use when interacting with or working within these institu-
tions. Corpus planning worked in the sense that Kiswahili was codified,
standardised, elaborated, disseminated and accepted widely enough for
mutual comprehension to be preserved. Acquisition planning worked to
the extent that large numbers of children had engaged with Kiswahili as
they were educated in the national education system and many learnt
enough to use it easily in their daily lives. Clearly full Kiswahilisation
had never been fully realised and the language had never fully replaced
English as the language of power. However, those taking this view would
argue that the process is not complete and, as the policy announcements
of 2015 showed, there is still will to promote Kiswahili and extend the
domains in which it is used. The process is ongoing. In a period in which
the economy is performing more strongly there may be funds to do
this.

4.4 Nation building in Indonesia: the role of Indonesian

The other case study in this chapter, Indonesia, provides some evidence
that what happened and is happening in Africa is happening elsewhere.
Indonesia is also an example of the kind of tensions rising within multi-
ethnic states between the centripetal efforts of the nation building centre
and the centrifugal pressures of globalisation.

4.4.1 A large country with a heterogeneous population

Indonesia is also a country that was arbitrarily united by a colonial
power. Consisting of more than 13,000 islands and stretching more
than 5,000 kilometres along the Equator, Indonesia is even more
heterogeneous than Tanzania, although, with few land borders, fewer
groups had been summarily divided by colonialism (Grant 1996). The

96 Language Policy and Language Planning

2010 census recorded a population of 237.4 million people, making
Indonesia the fourth largest state in the world. The vast majority of
the population (70 per cent) lives on the islands of Java and Sumatera
(2010 census).

Indonesians were never ruled as a single group prior to Dutch coloni-
sation. There had been empires in the area before the Dutch conquest,
but they were never coterminous with present day Indonesia. 21 The
Dutch built the colony from several territories and never attempted to
unite the peoples in any way. The Dutch East Indies were inhabited by
very diverse peoples ranging from those who lived in highly civilised
societies in which sophisticated technologies and philosophies had
developed prior to the arrival of the Europeans (e.g. at Yogjakarta and
Surakarta, the political centres of central and eastern Java) to societal
organisation at a very simple level (e.g. the hunter-gatherer societies of
Irian Jaya/Papua 22 ). Their diversity was recognised, very belatedly in the
colonial period, in a quasi-federal system set up by the Dutch in the final
years of their rule.

4.4.2 Civic nationalism

At independence the new government had to deal with this diversity.
The new nation would be composed of the hundreds of ethnic groups,
recognised in the census. The groups differed wildly in terms of size.
The Javanese community was the largest, followed by the Sundanese,
Madurese, Minangkabau, Buginese, Batak and Balinese. Smaller ethnic
groups include the Ambonese, Dayaks, Sasaks, Acehnese. And apart from
these indigenous communities, there were other communities, which
originated outside the archipelago (Chinese, Arabs, Indians, Europeans).
Despite this mix, federalism was rejected by the nationalist movement,
and the new Indonesian government declared Indonesia a unitary state
in 1949. The model for nation building was necessarily civic, although
leaders still sometimes evoked ethnic arguments for association:

The national state is only Indonesia in its entirety which existed in
the time of Shrivijaya and Majapahit and which now too we must set
up together. (Soekarno quoted in Drake 1993: 19)

Notwithstanding such rhetoric, Indonesians had no common history to
draw on except for the experience of Dutch colonialism (Drake 1993);
they had no common language; they did not subscribe to a common
religion.

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 97

4.4.3 The choice of a national language for Indonesia

The decision on the national language had been taken at the very
start of the independence struggle. In a congress of nationalist youth
organisations in 1928, Soekarno and others proclaimed their now cele-
brated ‘Pledge of Youth’ which called for ‘one territory – Indonesia, one
nation – Indonesian, one language – Bahasa Indonesia’. They made a
politically astute choice of language. Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) is
closely related to Malay, the lingua franca of the seafaring commercial
community that had been used throughout the archipelago for centuries
(Ricklefs 1993). Thus it was a language rooted in the area and familiar to
many. It was also a language with historical links to Islam, the religion
of the majority in Indonesia. The Islamic courts of Sumatra had been
Malay speaking (Johns 1996). At the same time, it was not the mother
tongue of any of the dominant groups in the nationalist movement.

Malay also had a long history as the language of literacy in the archi-
pelago. The earliest written records of the language are the seventh-
century Buddhist inscriptions on Sumatra (Ferguson 1977). Certainly
from AD 671 23 and perhaps even earlier Srivijaya was a centre of Buddhist
scholarship and Malay the medium of learning (Hunter 1996). Ninth-
century inscriptions show that the language was in early use on Java as
a language of literacy. Muslim missionaries who arrived in the twelfth
century adopted Malay as the language of their missionary work and,
as areas converted, Malay came to be written in Arabic script. The new
religion brought new ways of thinking, and much Malay vocabulary
in theological, spiritual and legal domains clearly derives from Arabic.
Malay was thus the language of prestige in the area for several centuries,
and when Europeans came to the archipelago they found the language
in widespread use in political and commercial lingua franca functions
in almost every coastal region of the Indies (Ferguson 1977). Pigafetta,
who accompanied Magellan, compiled a glossary of Malay words in the
Moluccan islands for the use of explorers. The Dutch navigator, Huygen
van Linschoten, wrote in 1614 that Malay was so prestigious among the
peoples of this part of the Orient that for an educated man not to know
it was like an educated Dutchman not knowing French (Kana 1994).
In the following centuries, the Christian religious organisations that
arrived in the wake of European adventurers and colonists used Malay
as the main language for their missionary work.

After Dutch rule was established, it was usual policy to use Malay rather
than Dutch in the education system for the various autochthonous
groups, as this practice maintained the distance that the Dutch favoured

98 Language Policy and Language Planning

in their colonial arrangements. This did not affect the majority of the
population, however, since formal education was only for a select few. 24
In 1918, the Volksraad (People’s Council) formally recognised Malay as
the second official language after Dutch. Under Japanese occupation it
replaced Dutch completely as the medium of education in 1942, and
in 1945 the Japanese accepted it as the official language of the colony.
At independence, Malay was the evident choice as Indonesia’s national
language. Its long history as regional lingua franca and administrative
language alongside Dutch and its prestige as the language adopted and
promoted by the independence movement made it the prime contender
(Drake 1993). Its long association with Islam, the main religion of
the area, gave it further status. Most importantly, its choice as official
language of the state prevented interethnic competition for linguistic
dominance, which would have resulted, most probably, in the imposi-
tion of Javanese on the rest. Javanese speakers were by far the largest
group in the country (47.8 per cent of population at independence), and
one that attracted a high level of resentment for their perceived domi-
nance in political and economic domains (Moeliono 1994). Javanese
could never have played the role of single national language and mobi-
lising force for unification. Malay, on the other hand, the mother tongue
of only 5 per cent of the population, was conspicuously unattached
to any politically salient ethnic community. In its Indonesian variety,
Bahasa Indonesia, it was related quite transparently to the institutions
of the state, yet at the same time retained enough historicity to stand as
a unifying symbol with appeal to most Indonesians. Bahasa Indonesia
was thus a perfect nation building language, able to add an iconic dimen-
sion to its practical function (Errington 1998) and provoking few ethnic
tensions. In the first decades of the new state the ideological importance
of Indonesian as a symbol of unity and the basis for ethnic and cultural
identity was enormous. Together with the national flag and Indonesia
Raya, the national anthem, Indonesian became the symbol of national
independence. In its practical function it enabled the political system,
the army, the education system, the bureaucracy to function as national
institutions and it acquired high status as elite groups used it increas-
ingly among themselves and in their professional capacities (Drake
1993). Policymakers were optimistic that it would allow a community of
communication within the new nation (Moeliono 1994).

4.4.4 Soekarto – the Old Order and language planning

Indonesia’s first president, Soekarno, saw his overriding priorities as
national unity stability and development (Eldridge 2002). A short

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 99

period of parliamentary democracy during the 1950s was attacked
within national political circles as having failed to achieve either pros-
perity or stability, and rebellions in West Sumatera and South Sulawesi
appeared to threaten national integrity. Soekarno’s solution was to
incorporate the army in government and administration, to return to
the 1945 constitution and to institute his system of Guided Democracy,
which curtailed the ability of different groups to present and defend
their interests according to the traditions of liberal-pluralist democ-
racy. The guiding principles underpinning the polity were enshrined
in Pancasila , 25 a philosophy which prioritised the values of consensus
and group unity. Decisions were to be resolved on the basis of delibera-
tion and consensus. Competitive voting and the recognition of majority
or minority interests would be avoided. An integralist discourse down-
played individual and group rights and presented the nation as a large
family. The result was a paternalist, monolithic system, allowing for no
opposition (Eldridge 2002).

Language policy mirrored wider political developments. The spread
of Indonesian as the language of state throughout Indonesia was to be
one of the key means of achieving the national unity that was central to
his vision. Indonesian was enshrined as the official language of the state
by Article 36 of the constitution. It became the language designated for
use in government, administration, the army and all education after the
first three years. The former colonial language had no function in the
new system and was not employed in domains where it would challenge
Indonesian (Dardjowidjojo 1998). Other languages of Indonesia were
guaranteed respect where they were ‘well preserved’ by the people (in a
note appended to Article 36) but were to play a very limited and minor
role in the public domain. 26 In 1972, the status of Indonesian was reaf-
firmed by President’s Resolution 57 which gave further clarification on
the domains of formal public life and state business where it had to be
employed. The national language continued to have a dual function:
it was both the language of literacy, modernisation and social mobility
and the language of national identity and patriotism. It became the civic
duty of speakers of languages other than Indonesian to become bilin-
gual and societal arrangements ensured that it was to their advantage to
do so. With this carrot and stick approach, the language spread. In 1971
40.5 per cent of Indonesians claimed to know Indonesian.

There had actually been a formal language planning agency for
Indonesian since the Japanese occupation, the Indonesian Language
Committee charged with creating terminology for science and tech-
nology and writing a grammar of Modern Indonesian. The National

100 Language Policy and Language Planning

Language Council, set up in 1947, built on this and became the Centre
for the Development and Preservation of the National Language (PPPB)
in 1975. Language planners saw themselves as having a key role in both
nation building and modernisation: the language had to be standardised
to maximise internal intelligibility and provide a medium for education;
it had to develop in new lexical domains if it was to be a tool in the
general drive for modernisation and development. Indonesian corpus
planning was a classic top-down operation, typical of the technocratic
1960s and 1970s, and has kept some of that ethos to the present day.

The standard developed and promoted by the language planning
agency was based on Johor-Riau Malay, the classical literary language,
rather than on Bazaar Malay, the koine or lingua franca developed for
use in intergroup communication. The result was diglossia. Indonesian
became the ‘high’ form (H) used for state affairs, literature, education,
administration and all written functions and Bazaar Malay continued as
the ‘low’ form (L) used in the street, the market, in casual exchange and
in popular entertainment. Thus, although the national language was
related to a koine that many citizens either spoke as a first language 27
or had in their repertoire, that koine differed widely from the standard.
In addition to the H/L difference there was much difference among L
dialects. The diversity within the L language was to be expected given
its development in several centres over several centuries. 28 The phono-
logical, semantic and syntactical variation exhibited by speakers of the
different varieties mean that some dialects listed as Malay were not easily
intelligible to Standard Malay or Indonesian speakers. 29

The education system was charged with ensuring the spread of the
newly standardised language, but in the first decades after independence
the Indonesian education department simply did not have at its disposal
the numbers of trained teachers with fluent standard Indonesian needed
to implement its national language policy. 30 So before spreading the new
standard Indonesian, the post-independence cohort of teachers had to
acquire this standard themselves. Teachers acquiring the language at the
same time as their pupils could not even draw on a bank of materials
in the standard, since it took some time to rewrite all basic textbooks in
Indonesian from the fourth year of schooling through to university.

In the face of these difficulties of introducing standard Indonesian
into the classroom, little attention was given to the fact that children
were studying through a second language (Rubin 1977). The preparation
for Indonesian medium education for the children who did not speak it
at home was only one hour per week in the year before they moved to
Indonesian as the only medium of education. The education service had

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 101

not decided whether it was teaching Indonesian as a second or foreign
language, nor what the consequences of this would mean for pedagogy
(Rubin 1977). Moreover, for those who did have some competence in
Malay before entering the fourth grade, there were also problems. Pupils
were not always aware of their language needs and deficiencies. Those
who had acquired Bazaar Malay in an informal way regularly overesti-
mated their competence in the Indonesian needed in school. They were
not fully conscious of the functional differentiation 31 between the H
and L varieties of the language and were resistant to attempts to plug
what they could not recognise as a gap in their knowledge (Rubin 1977).
Both foreign commentators like Rubin and Indonesian academics like
Moeliono called for research and action.

4.4.5 Soeharto – the New Order and language planning

Soekarno fell from power after an alleged left-wing coup in 1965 which
was put down by the army. A very bloody witch hunt ensued (Anderson
and McVey 2009). General Soeharto assumed full presidential powers
in 1967 and proclaimed a ‘New Order’ in Indonesian politics, which,
although its main focus was economic rehabilitation and develop-
ment, maintained the integralist aspects of Pancasila. The period of the
centralised, military, bureaucratic state of Soeharto’s New Order was to
last more than three decades and was accepted by the majority because
it was accompanied by a steady increase in living standards fuelled in
part by oil. 32 However, those who wanted political freedoms or who
contested the highly centralised nature of the Indonesian state were to
suffer. Soeharto’s regime imprisoned or killed large numbers of left-wing
militants and regional activists.

During this period, the fragile coalition of different peoples, reli-
gions and territories that formed Indonesia was only kept together by
military force. The government’s policy of resettlement of people from
crowded Java on less densely inhabited islands was seen as a melting pot
strategy, but was often unwelcome to host groups and sometimes had
to be enforced by the army. In many areas independence movements
gathered strength, for example, in Aceh on Sumatra and on Irian Jaya/
Papua. East Timor was a particular case, a sovereign state that Soeharto
had invaded in 1975 and annexed the following year. 33

Despite the corruption, nepotism 34 and human rights abuses of his
government, Soeharto remained in power until 1998. His grip on power
only loosened as the Asian financial and economic crisis hit Indonesia in
mid-1997, accompanied by the worst drought in the region in 50 years.
The rupiah plummeted, inflation soared and investors withdrew their

102 Language Policy and Language Planning

capital, provoking a swift plunge into recession. Food shortages, bank-
ruptcies and the suspension of Indonesian banking led to hardship and
insecurity. The Indonesians protested and rioting gradually intensified,
despite brutal police efforts to stem protest. After several months of
clashes, students occupied the country’s parliament grounds, demanding
the president’s resignation. On 21 May 1998, Soeharto bowed to the
pressure and resigned, naming vice president Habibie as his successor.

4.4.5.1 Language planning in the Soeharto period

Indonesian continued to spread from 1965 to 1998. The decennial
census reported approximately 50 per cent knowing the language in
1981 and 60.8 per cent in 1991. This is, of course, self-reporting, and
so should be treated with some caution as the replies often showed as
much about loyalty and identification as competence. More ‘objective’
monitors of competence may be the state exams for civil servants and
for school leavers, which show improvement, although there are claims
that scores here were manipulated to allow citizens through to higher
education or employment (Sugiyono and Latief 2000).

There was also an issue in the statistics of what respondents actually
meant by ‘Indonesian’. The planners found that the advantage of having
a unifying national language based on a lingua franca that many already
knew turned out to have drawbacks as well as advantages. Those who
spoke one of the L varieties were often resistant to acquiring the stand-
ardised version and even if they did not resist acquisition amalgamated
features from their L variety with H forms.

Even when learners of standard Indonesian were not affected by the
coexistence of related varieties, there were distinct regional differences.
Given the size and spread of the population and their hundreds of
different first languages, it was inevitable that when Indonesians learnt
the national language in school there would be divergence linked to
interference. Major regional differences can be traced to the regional
languages. For example, Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, Balinese, Toba
Batak and Acehnese each provoked distinctive features of lexis and
pronunciation (Moeliono 1994).

The valuing of variation within pluricentric languages that entered
the discourse of language planning in the late twentieth century (Clyne
1984; Canagarajah 1999) did not make it to Indonesia. Belief in the
goal of the unified, centralised state with a unified single language
continued to frame the approach of language planners and Sugiyono
and Latief (2000) report on how the state agencies set out to combat
divergence from the norm. The tone is shown in the government’s

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 103

campaign in 1988 urging Indonesians to speak ‘Good Indonesian’ and
the 2000 planning document requiring ‘codeswitching to be stopped’
(Alwi 2000: 13).

A second problem stemmed from the way that Indonesia’s diglossia
evolved to become societal cleavage not personal bilingualism. In the last
decades of the twentieth century it became less usual for an individual
to use the H form in one setting and the L form in another. Educated
Indonesians started to use the H in an ever-increasing number of settings
(Moeliono 1994; Fieldwork 2001, 2002). Thus the H form became the
language of the elites, differentiated from the morphologically less
complex language of the poor, Bazaar Malay, and from a hybrid variety
developing among the young. 35 The work done by British scholars
(e.g. Trudgill 1983) shows how speakers of English may be socially and
economically disadvantaged when their dialect variety is different from
English Received Pronunciation (RP), and that, in this situation, it may
actually be better to be a Gaelic or Welsh speaker. Thus L speakers in
Indonesian society were disadvantaged. Despite possessing knowledge of
the national language, they were pigeonholed for speaking a non-pres-
tigious variety and could be categorised as socially inferior with attitudes
towards them more contemptuous and dismissive than towards mother
speakers of major regional languages such as Javanese, Sundanese,
Madurese, Balinese, Toba Batak and Acehnese whose Indonesian is learnt
in the classroom (Kana 1994). This prejudice has not faded over the inter-
vening decades as the comments in 2015 on President Joko Widodo’s
thick provincial accent and provincial lexis show (Usman 2014).

4.4.5.2 Education in the Soeharto period

Under Soeharto, the education system remained highly centralised, the
core curriculum being set in Jakarta. School participation rose steadily:
primary level participation increased from 72 per cent in 1970 to 92 per
cent in 1995; junior secondary participation rose from 17 per cent in
1970 to 51 per cent in 1995 (World Bank 2008 ). All state pupils took a
national exam.

Islamic schools were brought under the umbrella of the Ministry of
Education following the Presidential Decree 15/1972. Most madrasah
thus became day schools funded by the state, which delivered the state
curriculum for 70 per cent of the week and devoted the remaining time
to Quranic study (Zuhdi 2005). The religious schools were centralised
under the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

This ‘one size fits all’ approach extended to language. As the cities,
particularly Jakarta, moved progressively to monolingualism, the

104 Language Policy and Language Planning

education system adopted a pedagogy assuming Indonesian to be the
first language of the pupils in the towns. However, in the countryside
and on the periphery of the archipelago, Indonesian remained a second
language and there were difficulties when Indonesian became a compul-
sory subject from the first grade onwards and was increasingly used as
a medium of instruction from the third grade (Fieldwork 2002). More
Indonesian in the classroom meant a reduction in education through
the mother tongue, which was widely seen as unwise in the bilingual
literature in terms of child development (UNESCO 2005).

Overall the education system was in difficulties and external asses-
sors held it to be failing (World Bank 1998). Low wages did not attract
the best talent and many teachers were inadequately trained. The low
levels of pay led to teachers taking other work to make a living wage and
not always turning up to teach. The pupils were seen as having insuffi-
cient contact hours, insufficient resources and an overloaded and unin-
tegrated curriculum (World Bank 1998). School management was poor
and sometimes corrupt with head teachers taking bribes from parents for
favours and services. Millions of rupiah for building work was creamed
off education budgets by central and local bureaucrats. School buildings
remained in a state of disrepair or were repaired shoddily (Colmey and
Liebhold 1999).

Unsurprisingly, Indonesian parents looked for other solutions. In the
early 1990s many turned to what was being termed the National Plus
school. The movement was a grass roots effort to raise the quality of
education in Indonesia. The impetus for the first schools came mainly
from Christians looking for religious values as well as academic excel-
lence in schooling. The idea spread outside the Christian community and
gradually the National Plus schools began to resemble the International
School system in Indonesia particularly in the way they included English
as a medium as well as a foreign language on their curriculum. In the
capital the number of International Schools that were English medium
or emphasised English language acquisition began to grow, although
there were still legal restrictions on both foreign investment in schools
and the medium of instruction.

4.4.5.3 The Chinese-Indonesians under Soeharto

At the end of the Soeharto period, the ethnic Chinese in the population
were also fleeing the public school system but interestingly their solu-
tion was sometimes different.

The Chinese population of Indonesia descends mainly from traders
who settled in Indonesia and often married local women. The Chinese
constituted (except in Borneo where they had come as indentured

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 105

labourers) a middle class, well integrated into Indonesian structures. The
linguistic shift from Chinese to Indonesian languages was more or less
complete. The Chinese-Indonesians had been at ease with Soekarno’s
civic nationalism but the increasingly ethnic tenor of Soeharto’s presi-
dency had made life difficult for them. Despite the fact that the Chinese
were a key part of the nation’s economy they were were marginal-
ised and discriminated against in all social spheres: culture, language,
politics, entrance to state-owned universities, and public service and
public employment. There was enforced assimilation and pressure to
Indonesianise names and convert to Islam. The teaching of Chinese was
not permitted in the school system (Suryadinata 2008).

In the economic crisis at the end of the Soeharto period, the majority
population directed their antagonism towards the comparative wealth
of the Chinese-Indonesian commercial class and in 1998 attacked and
looted their shops and businesses. The scale of the attacks and the clear,
ethnically defined target was a blow to integration. One of the many
outcomes of the riots has been an increasing tendency among the
Chinese community to send their children to Mandarin classes and to
the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to study. There is a strong sense
that as a group they should be forward planning for migration and be
ready to move if necessary (Fieldwork 2001). This seems a logical deci-
sion and very interesting to note in a period where English was so often
seen as the medium to acquire for migration. 36

4.5 Post Soeharto – a period of reform

Indonesians’ expression of their dissatisfaction with the economic situ-
ation widened to become general discontent with their political class,
which they saw as steeped in corruption. Although Habibie started a
programme of reforms, rioting continued and with it an increasingly
harsh response from the government. Many died. In the elections in
June 1999 Habibie was ousted and Abdurrachman Wahid of the National
Awakening Party, PKB, became president. However, Wahid was unable
to combat soaring inflation and rising unemployment; financial scan-
dals scarred his administration. The IMF halted loans because of his lack
of progress in tackling corruption. In 2001 Wahid was in turn forced
to step down and Megawati Soekarnoputri, Soekarno’s daughter and
leader of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, PDI-P, took over.
Criticism continued, however, with Megawati widely regarded as a weak
president. In the 2004 first ever direct presidential elections, a former
general, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, replaced her. Yudhoyono’s two
presidencies were difficult despite the improving economic situation

106 Language Policy and Language Planning

since the Indonesians were hit by various natural catastrophes (earth-
quakes, tsunami, landslides, volcanic eruptions and bird flu) and had to
deal with the growing problem of home-grown Islamic fundamentalist
terrorism. In 2014, Joko Widodo was elected president.

Despite these various difficulties, the first years of the millennium
proved a period of radical reform. There was electoral and constitutional
reform, decentralisation, a partial withdrawal by the military from its
deep political involvement, the launch of an anti-corruption campaign,
and the achievement of peace in two provinces that had been devas-
tated by communal violence and regional rebellion (Crouch 2010)

First the nearly 30 year civil war in Aceh province was resolved. In
the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, Sumatra
became a disaster zone with hundreds of thousands of victims. The
Islamist Free Aceh Movement had to find a means of working together
with the government to deal with the emergency and a peace deal was
brokered in 2005. Regional elections in 2006 brought the former separa-
tist leader, Irwandi Yusuf, to power as governor. 37

Second President Megawati Soekarno granted West Papua, another
province seeking to go its own way, limited autonomy in 2001. Since
then there has been a significant, albeit imperfect, implementation of
regional autonomy laws, and a reported decline in the levels of violence
and human rights abuses (Tebay 2005).

After the anti-Chinese riots of 1998, the ethnic Chinese emigrated
in large numbers, their proportion in the country falling sharply. 38
However with the optimism of the reforms, some returned and those
who had lain low allowed themselves to become more visible. Many
ethnic Chinese took advantage of the new democratic space to establish
political parties, non-governmental organisations and action groups to
fight for the abolition of discriminatory laws and defend their rights
(Hoon 2008).

An International Monetary Fund bail-out helped the Indonesian
economy recover from the 1997 financial crisis but the IMF imposed
economic and political reform. This period, the Reformasi in Indonesian,
was generally successful and after dipping to a low point in 1999 the
economy began to grow steadily at a rate of 5 per cent to 6 per cent
per annum in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Indonesian
economic health was illustrated as the acronym BRIC, coined to describe
the power of the emerging economies in Brazil, Russia, India and China,
was extended to BRIIC to include Indonesia. Both the Yudhoyono and
the Widodo presidencies focused on reducing poverty and inequality.
In March 2015, the World Bank’s quarterly report on Indonesia gave a
relatively positive assessment of the situation in Indonesia.

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 107

4.5.1 Multilingualism

In this period of rising prosperity and reasonable optimism there are a
number of linguistic behaviours that can be noted. First, the spread of
the national language continues; the numbers of Indonesians reporting
that they spoke the national language rose steadily with the decennial
census reporting approximately 83.3 per cent of Indonesians able to use
Indonesian in 2010. This correlates with rising school attendance. UNESCO
statistics for 2008–12 show enrolment in primary at nearly 100 per cent and
attendance at well over 90 per cent. Solutions have been found for some
of the linguistic problems that dogged education in the early years of the
Republic. There is no longer a shortage of teachers who have full mastery
of Indonesian. Standardisation of the language has been completed and
is accepted. Materials are available in Indonesian as Pusat Pengembangan
Penataran Guru (PPPG) the initial and in-service teacher training for
government schools worked on projects and published widely.

Second, the 2010 census revealed that Indonesian was not replacing
the other languages of the archipelago. They remained vigorous and for
most citizens the local language was still the family language. Table 4.1
shows that Indonesians maintain local languages to interact with their
families, in their localities and in their provinces.

Table 4.1 Percentage distribution of most common language spoken at home
by ethnic group

Ethnic Group Indonesian Own language Other languages

Javanese 16.33 77.36 6.32
Sundanese 13.31 83.70 2.99
Malay 18.95 76.23 4.82
Batak 52.56 43.11 4.33
Madurese 3.30 91.12 5.58
Betawi 72.57 25.41 2.02
Minangkabau 23.87 71.19 4.94
Buginese 32.15 59.14 8.71
Bantenese 10.32 33.13 56.54
Banjarese 10.85 86.13 3.02
Acehnese 14.67 84.17* 1.16
Balinese 6.29 92.69 1.02
Chinese 60.49** 24.07 15.44

Note: *Despite the history of conflict with Jakarta and the long struggle for independence it
is interesting that there is no great difference in language behaviour between the Acehnese
and the Indonesians in other provinces.

**Interestingly, the group that claimed to use the national language most in the family was
the category ethnic Chinese, the group that had come under attack in the 1998 riots and the
group from which there had been significant migration.

Source: Adapted from Indonesian Census 2010.

108 Language Policy and Language Planning

These figures suggest that many of the 83.3 per cent of Indonesians
claiming to know Indonesian are only using it in formal settings such
as education, media, contact with government departments and as a
lingua franca to deal with the linguistic heterogeneity of Indonesia. In
their majority Indonesians are bi- or multilingual and have not moved
to monolingualism and exclusive use of the national language.

Their language of home, friendship and neighbourhood remains the
local language. There is perhaps even a swing back towards the heritage
languages. Many Javanese, for example, displayed great emotional
commitment and predisposition to Indonesian as an indication of their
support for the Republic. To have their children acquire it and use it
properly was a commitment to make independence work. The Javanese,
a high status group which hitherto had been literate in one of the pres-
tige languages of the archipelago, were willing for their children to be
educated in the new medium, in an unusual forfeiture of privilege. 39 In
the twenty-first century there seems to be some regret that the previous
generation made that decision and an indication of a return to Javanese
literacy 40 (Errington 1998). Warih (2001) expresses a growing band of
opinion when he calls for Javanese to be taught as a subject within the
education system to ensure that the younger generation are literate in
the language, and for more newspapers and magazines to be published
in Javanese.

In other areas there are also calls for a return to the ancestral language
and one of the telling developments is the change of attitude to be
noted. Populations that had reported feelings of shame when they could
not express themselves in the national language, now are more likely
to express pride in their ancestral language (Miehle 2001). The 1999
Act No. 22 on the autonomy of the regions gives them the authority to
finance the preservation and development of their languages. This was
previously the remit of the PPPB, which caused if not a conflict of inter-
ests, then certainly a conflict of agendas. Now regions have the right to
standardise and then to introduce into the curriculum the languages
that they choose to support and promote (Mahsun 2000). Thus the cate-
gory of local languages that were eradicated in other nation building
settings may be maintained in Indonesia

Third, there was more English on the curriculum. The 1997 economic
crisis had graphically illustrated the vulnerability of domestic markets
and the power of external influences. Government policymakers who
had seen the spread of Indonesian as key to achieving economic and
technological advance now rethought their strategy and decided that
the needs of the knowledge economy meant that Indonesians should

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 109

also acquire competence in English (Huda 2000). This was a challenge
for the state system. The highly centralised education system which
foregrounded national unity and equality of educational experience for
all students did not allow for differentiation and so English became an
obligatory subject for all students at Junior High and above. To grad-
uate from Junior High students had to be able ‘to demonstrate skills in
listening, reading, speaking, and writing in simple … . English’. There
were problems with this. Now it was teachers’ competence in English
that was deemed a stumbling block to effective teaching and learning
(Fieldwork at PPPG 2000; Hamied 2000). Problems of motivation among
students was another. A proportion of Indonesian students did not see
adequate reason to acquire English. In many of the islands they did
not have regular contact with native speakers and did not see that their
future roles would require knowledge of English as a lingua franca.
The obligatory status of English thus led to a high level of disaffection
among certain groups of students who were already having to master
one second language in education and were now being forced to learn
another (PPPG 2000). 41 In the early years of the English for all policy, the
teacher training agency reported that:

[m]ost high school graduates are unable to communicate in English
although we have been teaching them for six years. (Soejoto 2000)

However, in the cities and within the private school sector attitudes
were different. Middle-class parents, anxious that their children be in a
position to participate in the increasingly transnational nature of much
economic activity, demanded more English as both subject and medium.
They wanted to prepare their children linguistically for roles, not neces-
sarily at national levels of activity but at global. The restrictions that
had been placed in the early Republic on education through a foreign
language were removed. Law No. 20/2003 on National Education allowed
foreign entities to invest in Indonesian education, albeit in conjunction
with local institutions. In the private schools in the big cities pupils were
taking both English language classes and classes through the medium of
English.

This prepared students for higher education where much was in
English. In Indonesia 80 per cent of universities were now private. The
Higher Education Act No.12/2012 July 2012 promoted the partnership
between Indonesian institutions and foreign universities and relation-
ships have mainly been with Anglophone countries. The increase in
private education underscores the deep class divisions already apparent

110 Language Policy and Language Planning

in Indonesia, and the children of the elite group are increasingly differ-
entiated from the rest by their language repertoire, which includes good
English skills as well as knowledge of the national language.

Indonesia has never been an egalitarian society but, after independ-
ence, linguistic divisions were being erased. Less economically privi-
leged groups embraced Indonesian as the language of opportunity,
which could contribute to their social mobility. Increasingly mastery
of the national language has become a necessary but not sufficient skill
for employment. It was those acquiring high levels of competence in
English who obtained the most prestigious and well paid jobs. Private
companies required English language qualifications before considering a
candidate (Sugiyono and Latief 2000). Now many feel that the linguistic
capital that they believed they were acquiring is worth less to them than
in past decades and this may fuel some disaffection. Laitin (1999) has
noted how alienated people feel, when competition for the best jobs goes
to those who are linguistically advantaged. Since the economic crises
of the late 1990s an English-speaking elite in Jakarta has increasingly
turned outwards to grasp opportunity. In such a context, differentiation
in linguistic skills and repertoire works against vertical integration and
causes resentment.

In conclusion to this section we might ask how language repertoires
will develop in the situation where Indonesians have not relinquished
their ancestral languages, elites have embraced English and, at the same
time, Indonesian is spreading as the responses in the census indicate.
The respected Indonesian scholar, Anton Moeliono, addressed this
problem two decades ago. He suggested then that Indonesian was under
attack from the instrumental advantage conferred by English. At the
same time, he observed that the integrational pull of the various vernac-
ulars of the Indonesian archipelago has not waned as the nation builders
hoped:

The lack of motivation to master the national language adequately,
apart from the competitive influence of English, is related to language
attitudes of people towards Indonesian We can say that people gener-
ally have a higher level of emotional commitment towards their
mother tongue than towards Indonesian. (Moeliono 1994: 211)

His analysis still holds true. And he raises a set of interesting questions.
If Indonesians see their local language as the medium for intimacy,
friendship, local solidarity, local employment – what is the role for the
national language as a language of identity? If Indonesians see English

Nation Building in the Wake of Colonialism 111

as a language which gives access to the flows, networks and interac-
tions of a globalising world and qualification for the most prestigious
jobs – what is the role for the national language as a language of social
mobility? If Indonesians maintain linguistic repertoires which include
local language, national language and international language this will
be an unusual development. Past experience suggests that groups do not
maintain two languages for wider communication nor two languages
for in-group interaction and identity.

4.6 Conclusions

The Tanzanians and the Indonesians have much in common. The insti-
tution of a national language top-down has been moderately successful.
Census data shows a growing number of Indonesians claiming to know
their national language. Education policy to continue Swahilisation has
been welcomed by many in Tanzania. However, the national language
has not come to play exactly the same role that it did in European nation
building. Although Kiswahili and Indonesian have become languages of
social mobility, in the classic manner of nation building, and a Tanzanian
or an Indonesian could not progress far without knowing them, they
have turned out to be necessary rather than sufficient linguistic skills.
The language repertoire necessary for social promotion has to include
English since this language plays a major role in education and elite
employment in both states.

The context has changed. In the past nation building took place
within national boundaries and in relative isolation. In the late twenti-
eth-century nation building was happening in tandem with increasing
globalisation. Tanzanians and Indonesians have thus been affected by
increasing global interconnectedness in their internal economics and
politics. They have also been influenced by global networks as they
attempted to construct their national communities of communication.

So it is perhaps time to explore the phenomenon of globalisation and
enquire what evidence there is to suggest that the nation state system
has been irrevocably altered by the processes, networks and practices of
a globalising world.

272

This chapter of the book deals with all the other languages of the world,
languages that are neither the official language of a state, a region or a
province nor important trading languages or intergroup lingua francas.
This is an enormous topic because most of the world’s 7000 1 or so
languages fall into this category. And most of these can be considered
in danger.

Although, at first sight, the contexts of minority languages as dispa-
rate as the three case studies in this chapter (the Albanian spoken in
Sicily, the language of hunter-gatherers on the north-west frontier of
China and the language of subsistence farmers in the Bolivian Altiplano)
might appear to have little in common, on closer examination it
becomes evident that some of the pressures on them are similar and
the speakers’ experiences comparable. The processes of nation building
and globalisation discussed in the earlier chapters of this book are at the
root of these pressures. Indeed, as we have seen, nationalism is one of
the main reasons why small groups come to be conceived as minorities,
and nation building is the context that puts them under most pressure
to become bilingual or to shift language. As education, modern state
administration, modern forms of media and new technologies enter
settings where the local language has no written form and only small
numbers of speakers, it is easy to understand how difficult maintenance
of the local language can become and how strong the pressure to shift
entirely. Romaine reminds us of the four key reasons why so many
languages are in an endangered position:

Fewer than 4 per cent of the world’s languages have any kind of offi-
cial status in the countries where they are spoken … most languages
are unwritten, not recognised officially, restricted to local community

12
Endangered Languages

Endangered Languages 273

and home functions and spoken by very small groups of people.
(2002: 1)

Given the external pressures on speakers and the likely choices that
they will make, under these pressures, a number of these languages are
likely to die out completely. Krauss (1992) suggests that the number to
disappear might be in the region of 4000, or two-thirds of the languages
currently spoken. Hale (1998) and Woodbury (1998) believe that only
600 out of the 6000–7000 languages are fully secure.

Crystal (2000) poses three questions that arise from this prediction:
Should we care? Can anything be done? Should anything be done? To
which one could add, if there is something to be done, are scholars
and practitioners of LPLP the right people to do it? Can behaviour be
influenced through policymaking? This chapter examines some of the
reasons advanced for language maintenance and protection, and then
reviews some of the issues in three different case studies where there
has been policy and planning to promote and protect an endangered
language.

12.1 Should we care?

There are several arguments advanced as reasons why humanity as a
whole should not let languages disappear. We shall look at the strength
of evidence for each one and then move to what can be done if we
accept the arguments. The arguments can be categorised under a number
of headings. The first is that diversity is good per se, in the way that
biodiversity is good. Second, language maintenance allows members
of a group to remain in touch with their own history and cultural
heritage. Third, language is an essential element of identity that should
be respected. Fourth, languages constitute an irreplaceable resource for
humanity.

12.1.1 Language diversity is good per se

The hypothesis developed by the American linguists, Franz Boas,
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, is a cornerstone of the argument
that language diversity is good per se. Their fieldwork among Native
Americans led to the development of the theory that groups develop
their languages in reaction to and in relation with their different bio-
niches and that group experiences mediated through language allow
them to develop particular worldviews. The way that the lexis and

274 Language Policy and Language Planning

syntax of a language develops encourages its speakers to interact and
portray experience in a certain way:

(T)he background linguistic system (in other words the grammar) of
each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing
ideas, but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide
for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions,
for his synthesis of mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not
an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part
of a particular grammar, and differs, from slightly to greatly, between
different grammars. We dissect nature along different lines laid down
by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from
the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare
every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented
in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by
our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our
minds. (Whorf 1956: 212–13)

This led Whorf to a highly determinist position:

[N]o individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality
but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation even while he
thinks himself most free … We are thus introduced to a new principle
of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same
physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their
linguistic backgrounds are similar or can be calibrated. (1956: 214)

This means that Whorf believed that some concepts are ultimately
untranslatable. Sapir was slightly more cautious. He is quite categorical
that national characteristics (which he terms group temperament) and
language have no intimate connection and that language and culture
have no causal relationship. He did, however, advance the idea that
there can be no thought without language, and that the human ability
to conceptualise arises as the language faculty is refined (Sapir 1921: 15).
Because of this, it is argued, humans are very much at the mercy of the
particular language which has become the medium of expression for
their society, and they interpret through the veil of their language or
according to the framework it proposes. Sapir believed, however, that in
terms of complexity, the language of the cultivated Frenchman and the
South African Bushman are in essence perfectly comparable although
different (Sapir 1921: 22). Moreover, he held that speakers of differing

Endangered Languages 275

languages are never imprisoned in their language, because all languages
have the potential to be elaborated and concepts adopted.

The ecolinguistics school, which has developed in the last decades,
begins from this premise, that there is a strong relation between a
language and a worldview. A central claim is that certain languages are
perfectly adapted to communicating certain values and attitudes. For
example, the languages of pre-industrial societies are held to promote
respect for the natural world (Mühlhäusler 2001; Harrison 2007). In
contrast, Standard Average European languages (SAE) 2 deal with indus-
trialisation and the pollution it causes with a semantic imprecision that
fudges, euphemisms that mislead and an absence of terms that can
direct attention to certain important processes. Mühlhäusler argues that
the languages of the big polluting states allow them to systematically
underestimate and play down the consequences of dangerous practices.
Chawla (2001) compares lexis from Native American languages and
English to illustrate how language frames what we see and how we act
in our relations to the natural world. He explains how Cherokee and
Pueblo extend kinship terms to nature and claims that:

[B]ecause of these beliefs, Indians have traditionally treated the inani-
mate and animate world with awe and concern in ways that do not
indiscriminately damage the natural environment. (Chawla 2001: 118)

He contrasts this with an analysis of English, where he concludes that its
individualising tendencies contribute to English speakers’ failure to see
the environment holistically and exacerbate their propensity to act for
egotistical advantage, even when this may be against the greater good.
Influenced by a scientific worldview, they interpret the Cherokees’
anthropomorphic attributions to the animate and inanimate world as
superstition and dismiss them.

The ecolinguistic literature generally tends to assume a close and
essential relation between language and knowledge. Accordingly, when
intergenerational language transmission breaks down and a language
disappears, there is likely to be a serious loss of inherited knowledge.
The argument is that any reduction of language diversity diminishes the
adaptational strength of our species because it lowers the pool of knowl-
edge from which we can draw (Bernard 1992; Harrison 2007).

This would only be the case if the strong Whorfian claim that
translation is ultimately impossible were true. However, translation
is possible. The very fact that Mühlhäusler and Chawla can point out
that Westerners ignore important aspects of the environment, and that

276 Language Policy and Language Planning

new ways of expressing our experience might change how we behave
towards it, exemplifies Sapir’s claim that elaboration and adaptability are
always possible. Speakers of SAE could gain insights from peoples whose
languages make the need to respect the environment more explicit. If a
certain language does not have the lexis for a particular subject, it can
be borrowed or invented. If it does not have a particular structure, it can
be developed. If there is a particular way of reasoning or conceiving a
topic in a language, it can be copied. If precise ways of talking about the
ecosystem make speakers more aware of diversity and of damage and
encourage them to be active stewards of biological and ecological diver-
sity, then these can be copied and learnt.

The argument that protecting languages where relationships are encap-
sulated in particular ways might make us more respectful of nature is a
weak one for the preservation of the language. We would have to believe
that there was an essential relationship between the language and the
concepts expressed for the argument to hold. However, many people do
take this line. Skutnabb-Kangas argues that the language/concept link is
never fully translatable:

Traditional knowledge may indeed linger even after a native language
is lost, but the richness and diversity of that knowledge cannot survive
even one generation of language loss. (2000: 259)

But, if we take a non-essentialist position, we cannot use this argu-
ment for the preservation of the language. There is no reason why
the insightful framing of other languages could not be imported into
SAE languages if their speakers decided to develop the competence to
reflect different ecological positions. The question is not whether it can
be done but whether it will be done. Are SAE speakers being alerted to
the way that their languages obfuscate and mislead in environmental
affairs by the ecology lobby? Yes, they are. Articles from the ecolinguistic
group are doing so. Whether such awareness will result in more careful
linguistic formulation in other languages and more ecologically aware
behaviour are further developments and not at all inevitable. Certainly
there are precedents for believing that language change may be associ-
ated with change in other behaviour and attitudes. The feminist move-
ment argued that aspects of practice in the SAE languages contributed to
patriarchal attitudes. A reworking of terms and structures to change this
was advocated as a way of changing attitudes, influencing behaviour
in relationships and promoting greater equality in society. In another
example, the anti-vivisection lobby points out that the impersonal

Endangered Languages 277

constructions of English scientific discourse may well contribute to the
desensitising necessary for researchers to function in the laboratory
(Kahn 2001). Campaigners argue that if those engaged in vivisection
were forced to articulate what they were actually doing, then they might
feel less comfortable doing it.

There is an important point here for small language survival, because,
if the argument is valid, it could just as easily be used against minority
languages. Anyone adopting a strong Whorfian position, whereby
languages are not ‘interchangeable’ (Mithun 1998), would have also to
accept that a group could never transcend its position, could not learn
from others more advanced in some area, through translation. According
to this logic, to profit fully from advances in cognition, new concepts
in technology, novel art forms and so on, members of the small group
would need to acquire the language in which they had been developed,
with the consequent risk of language shift.

There is also a wider claim from the ecolinguists. Parallels have been
drawn between linguistic diversity and biodiversity. Extrapolating from
the ecological mainstream, they argue that diversity is good per se, and
that the multiplicity of languages contributes to the health of an envi-
ronment. This seems to be a metaphor that cannot be taken too far and
one that is difficult to support with evidence. Adaptation to an environ-
ment is positive, and can be shown to be so in the case of language.
Mühlhäusler points out that

Languages over time become fine-tuned to particular environmental
conditions. It is language that allows people to become efficient
users of the environment. But it takes time to get to know a place.
(Mühlhäusler in a university newspaper interview 1998, quoted by
Skutnabb-Kangas 2001: 259)

But language diversity can also be seen as contrary to human well-being.
Although Crystal (2000) and Skutnabb-Kangas (2000) cite the Mexican
myth that holds that the goddess Iatiku created different language
groups so that they could not quarrel, it is difficult to find examples
from history where incomprehension safeguarded peaceful coexistence.
There is more data to confirm the view expressed by George Steiner,
already mentioned in the Introduction to this book:

Time and again linguistic differences and the profoundly exasperating
inability of human beings to understand each other have bred hatred
and reciprocal contempt. In short: languages have been throughout

278 Language Policy and Language Planning

human history zones of silence to other men and razor edges of divi-
sion. (Steiner 1998: 58) 3

Most importantly perhaps, too much reliance on parallels with the
natural world raises the spectre of ‘survival of the fittest’. This aspect of
the biological metaphor is not compelling if we want to argue for the
preservation of languages under threat.

Thus, the ecolinguistic case seems to rest on analogies that do not
fully hold, on a conviction that language and thought are so inextri-
cably linked that worldviews cannot be understood outside the language
group where they originate, and that languages are ultimately untrans-
latable. The claim that a language may provide insights and make rela-
tionships evident is probably true, but it does not furnish a sufficient
reason to maintain a language, where a group is shifting language for
its own project. The argument does not stand on its own unless one has
accepted the strong Whorfian position.

12.1.2 Language, history and group continuity

Another reason advanced for preserving languages is to ensure that the
past remains contactable:

With language loss the link with the recorded and transmitted cultural
legacy is broken. (Bourhis 2001: 6)

Where languages have a stable standard, the written form allows access
to the group’s past, beyond living ancestors. The texts of former genera-
tions are available for their descendants, because the language does not
change substantially. In some groups too rigid adherence to historical
norms sometimes causes problems. Where a written standard has been
based on the literary forms of an earlier period, there will be some
distance between the written and the modern spoken language, with all
the difficulties this entails for universal literacy. This was what occurred
in Italy and Greece where early standardisation drew from the canon of
a past golden era. The diglossia and social exclusion it can cause may be
seen as a high price to pay to maintain historical continuity. In other
cases the planners of the written standard may have consciously broken
with the past in order to simplify or to align the language with a new
ideology. This was the case with the alphabet reform in Turkey, and the
change has made old texts inaccessible for modern Turkish readers. 4

If the language has no written form, the texts of the group are passed
on in the oral tradition. The data on how oral transmission is affected by

Endangered Languages 279

language shift is not extensive and, as yet, is inconclusive. Eades (1988:
97) finds that Australian Aboriginal people maintain ‘significant Aboriginal
and social aspects’ and ‘distinctively Aboriginal interpretations and mean-
ings’ even when their language of interaction is English. Woodbury (1998),
commenting on Eades, agrees that content and style can be transported
from language to language, but wonders what is left out. Jocks (1998) gives
an account of Native American religious ceremonies in which he tries to
evaluate how far those who participate in translated ceremonies can expe-
rience the event in the same way as those who speak Kanien’keha, the
language used in the rituals he studied. He concludes that, although trans-
lation is possible, something is inevitably lost in translation.

This may be true but Jocks’ research on these translated/interpreted
ceremonies itself provides just one example to show that group history,
memory and knowledge can be preserved even when there is language
shift. Whether or not they will be preserved will depend on group
attitudes to past organisation of the society and its values and atti-
tudes. Memory may be jettisoned along with the language if there is
a strong modernising current in the group. It will also depend on the
group composition during and after shift. If there is dispersal, penetra-
tion and mixing, then opportunities and occasions for the transfer of
group history, memory and knowledge may be fewer. It is not inevitable,
however, and the core of ideas and values can survive a change in the
language that carries them as they can survive a change in the speaker
that expresses them.

In another branch of linguistics there is a long tradition of research
into one aspect of linguistic continuity. Historical linguists track lexis
in language shift where groups are conquered and assimilated, tracing
a word through a set of languages to show patterns of contact and
how words passed from one language to another as goods or ideas
were exchanged. 5 There is usually a trace of substratum groups in the
language and the gene pool of a people (Cavalli-Sforza 2000). It is, of
course, of little comfort to a conquered and decimated group to know
that elements of their language, perhaps along with some of their genes,
survived, incorporated into the new society. This is a very weak form of
language maintenance! However, the fact that there are more languages
that have died out than are now spoken means that it is a very widespread
phenomenon. These previous languages survive in the vocabulary of the
languages that come after. Naturally, topography is particularly likely to
bear witness to former speakers on the territory.

For there to be no legacy from a language that is eclipsed to the language
that supersedes it suggests conscious repression of the transfer process.

280 Language Policy and Language Planning

Where there is no trace of a language in situations of contact, the reasons are
sometimes to be found in paranoid attitudes among the dominant group
and fear among the subordinate. Humphrey (1989) discusses how speakers
of Buryat, in south-east Siberia, avoided importing Buryat terms into
Russian in order not to offend the Soviet authorities by using Mongolisms.
This was a widespread reaction among local political elites who were aware
of Stalin’s fear of pan-Mongol nationalism. They would not risk misrep-
resenting themselves as unorthodox in a dangerous political period and
so rejected codeswitching and tag-switching when speaking Russian. This
was one of the factors that halted the process of borrowing and mixing
and maintained strict compartmentalisation of the languages.

12.1.3 Language and identity

The third reason advanced for maintaining languages is that a language
is a component of identity and that the disappearance of the language
of a group has immense repercussions for healthy self-regard (Joseph
2004; Edwards 2009). Language is a robust marker of group member-
ship and one that is not easily changed. It is one of the stronger markers
of identity because there are cognitive as well as psychological barriers
to be overcome when individuals shift language. An outsider cannot
decide to join a linguistically distinct group simply by willing it. The
apprenticeship before being able to make the change will be long and
possibly hard. Particularly in the case of an adult learner, it may never
be complete. The strong poststructuralist argument that language is
contingent falls apart when we witness the difficulties that individuals
have when they are forced to shift language.

This is not to reify or essentialise language. The relative difficulty of
changing language group does not mean that it cannot be done, only
that it is done with difficulty. There is nothing intrinsic about language
and identity: they can both shift; they can both be hybrid; they can
both be layered. That being said, if a group views membership of their
language group as essential to their identity and believes their society
would be fundamentally altered in ways that they do not want by
language shift, then it seems their perfect right to couple identity and
language. As May (2001) argues, even if language is a contingent factor
of identity, that is not to say that it is not experienced as significant for
or constitutive of identity. The strongest argument for taking the neces-
sary institutional decisions to support maintenance of a language has to
be because its individual speakers wish to do so.

However, the problem then arises that language maintenance cannot
be an individual decision. An individual does not want to be the only

Endangered Languages 281

person maintaining a language. S/he wants the group to maintain
the language so that s/he can function in that language within it. In
Chapter 10 we considered whether language rights can be seen as indi-
vidual rights or whether they are de facto a kind of group right. The
point is fundamental to the identity issue. Using the language of a group
is a kind of social glue. Where speakers are part of a small language
group and know only that language, their repertoire constrains them to
social commerce within that group, often limits their choice of marriage
partner and usually dictates where they can work. If the group’s concern
to maintain solidarity and continuity placed a limitation on the other
languages that members may learn, this would be an infringement of
individual rights. However, discouraging the learning of other languages
may seem to group leaders the only way to preserve group language in
the face of economic and political pressures on individuals to shift. 6

There are several dilemmas here. On the one hand, it would be invid-
ious if the individual’s right to acquire a language that gives access to
higher levels of education and allows social and geographical mobility
were curtailed in any way to encourage language maintenance among
the group. 7 On the other hand, the decision of individuals to acquire a
language that is instrumentally more useful affects not just them but
the group as a whole, because each individual decision to acquire a
dominant language (L2) has an incremental effect and makes mainte-
nance of the dominated languages (L1) more difficult. In the best case
scenario, learning the L2 leads to personal bilingualism and societal
diglossia. The L1 may not develop the lexis necessary for many domains
but remains secure in the private spheres. In the worst case scenario
for language maintenance, the L2 penetrates the private sphere as well
and there is personal and family shift. Where there is education in a
standard language and where there is scope for social and geographical
mobility, there may be exit from the language group, and then numbers
of the group may dwindle and those remaining become isolated. This
has always happened. It is the scale of the phenomenon, which is the
new development:

If members of a subordinate population have the opportunity to
learn the language of the dominant group, some or all of them will
usually do so. It seems that it is not so much the tendency to learn a
dominant group language which has increased a great deal in modern
times, but rather the opportunity to do so, and concomitantly and
more importantly for linguistic diversity, the tendency to abandon
one’s ancestral language in the process. (Dorian 1998: 5)

282 Language Policy and Language Planning

The second problem is concerned with freedom of choice. It is difficult
for individuals to choose the language(s) in which they are socialised
and educated since this happens in childhood. The adults responsible
for the socialisation and education of the younger generation determine
the medium. The literature abounds with numerous examples of how the
decision of parents or educators to socialise and educate in the majority
language has been experienced as deprivation, exclusion and loss by those
for whom the choice was made (Dorian 1998; Mithun 1998; Crystal 2000).
Hale (1998) believes that not being taught the language of one’s group can
even give rise to grief. On the other side, a major theme in all literature
is the individual who rails against the constraints of the primary group
and struggles to transcend them. Literature may gloss over the linguistic
dimension of this but transcendence mostly involves language acquisition.
The fundamental problem is that the choice of language(s) of socialisation
and education is not one that individuals can make for themselves.

Before leaving the subject, there is perhaps one further point to be
made about the contingency of the link between identity and language.
Does group identity survive when the group no longer speaks its ances-
tral language? For example, can the southern, mainly non-Welsh-
speaking Welsh claim equivalent Welshness to those in the north-west
where the Welsh language is more widely spoken? Can immigrants
who assimilate linguistically in the host country maintain their iden-
tity? Clearly in the first case there will be different contributing factors
to what makes these two groups see themselves as Welsh, but they may
be no less powerful. The powerful factor in the cultural vitality of both
groups may be the fact that both are cohesive groups that continue to
be a majority in their settings. This is not the case in the second situ-
ation. Identification with the land of origin may continue to be very
strong and maintained through religious practices or cultural main-
tenance in diet and dress, even where, given the need to survive and
the hope of prospering in the new environment, there is linguistic
accommodation. However, where there is complete loss of the original
language of the group in a situation of migration this must affect iden-
tity, because new language behaviour will affect patterns of contact.
Migrant groups in the United States have tended to shift language
within three generations (Fishman 1977) and this has happened in
some cases of migration into Europe. In such cases contact between
grandparents and grandchildren is cut, and, at the very least, a new,
hyphenated identity becomes likely for the younger group.

It seems unproblematic to suggest that where there is language change
there will be changing identity. This is not to agree with the Whorfian

Endangered Languages 283

notion that a language carries other aspects of the culture in a particular
way and makes likely certain ways of being and that a change of language
necessarily affects that. It is to recognise that patterns of association are
central to identity formation. Where individuals acquire the medium
that opens the door to other groups, diverse contacts and different influ-
ences, it is difficult not to accept that identity will be altered. Very few
who become members of new networks and who are exposed to new
ideas will not change their perception of their identity in some way.
Bourdieu’s concept of habitus describes the process: the embodied mean-
ings of groups do not determine how individuals act but they provide an
influential frame of reference. To acquire more embodied meanings is to
widen and alter frames of reference.

12.1.4 Diversity as a research resource

Another argument from those who are striving to save endangered
languages is that they are an irreplaceable source of information on the way
that the human brain processes thought. If every linguistic system finds a
slightly different way for individuals to conceptualise, reason, communi-
cate, be expressive and so on, then the disappearance of a language takes
away a building block that might allow us to understand the process more
clearly. Thus preserving the thousands of human languages that currently
exist may help scholars to understand how language works. Hale (1998)
says categorically that the loss of linguistic diversity will be a loss to schol-
arship. Like Mühlhäusler (1996), Fill (1993), and a selection of contribu-
tors to Dascal (1992, 1995), he contends that we must have as much data
from as many languages as possible to reveal how language works. Every
language that is lost is one less example of the phenomenon, and with
it may go a particular feature that exists nowhere else. At the same time,
linguists argue that the more languages available for study, the more likely
the search for the universals of language will be successful:

While a major goal of linguistic science is to define the grammars of
all natural languages, attainment of that goal is severely hampered,
some would say impossible, in the absence of linguistic diversity. If
English were the only language on the face of the earth, we could
not know literally hundreds of things which are permitted, even
predicted, by universal grammar and accidentally missing in English,
or any other single language. (Hale 1998: 192)

Further research data comes from the fact that the languages of people
in apparently simple societies are as complex in linguistic terms as the

284 Language Policy and Language Planning

languages of societies, which are much more technologically and socially
elaborate. Hale (1998) claims that so-called simple societies should be
seen as rich in mental wealth with respect to language formulation and
ritual interaction. Difference among groups is very revealing about deep
and surface levels of the evolution of the human brain. However, it
would be naive to think that the needs of scholarly research alone could
ever be a compelling reason for a group in the process of shift to reassess
their behaviour and change tack.

12.2 What can we do?

12.2.1 Describing the problem

The first step is to recognise and describe the problem. The sheer scale
and speed of language shift and loss led to heightened interest in the
fate of the smaller languages of the world in the last decades of the twen-
tieth century. Linguists started making it the focus of major interna-
tional meetings as, for example, in the conferences on maintenance and
loss of minority languages, held in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands,
in 1988 and 1992, the conference on language endangerment held at
Dartmouth College in the United States in 1995, and the conference
on language rights in Hong Kong in 1996. In 1993, UNESCO set up
the ‘Endangered Languages Project’, a programme to record the world’s
disappearing languages before their last speakers died ( www.endan-
geredlanguages.com ), published an Atlas of the World’s Languages in
Danger and maintains a website to list funding opportunities. Individual
programmes to protect, maintain or revitalise endangered language
groups have proliferated.

A growing number of linguists have made the position of endan-
gered languages and policy reactions to endangerment their specialism.
Representative scholarship can be found in Dorian (1989), Hale (1992);
Fase, Jaspaert and Kroon (1992), Grenoble and Whaley (1998 and
2006), Nettle and Romaine (2000) Harrison (2007), King and Schilling-
Estes (2008); Austin and Sallabank (2011); Kasten and De Graaf (2013);
Thomason (2015).

Numerous typologies have been developed to describe the different
situations along the continuum of endangerment and to identify the
variables that lead to the disappearance of a language. Conflating them 8
gives a five-point scale indicating the declining probability of survival.

Language groups that are viable and unproblematic. These languages 1.
will survive.

Endangered Languages 285

Language groups that are viable although small. On demographic 2.
grounds these languages could be considered to have too few speakers
to sustain them, but are likely to survive because of the presence of
other factors. The reasons for expecting survival could derive from
the isolation of the community, the traditional and conservative
nature of the society, the high status of the community relative to
neighbouring groups, the value placed on language as a marker of
identity, and so on.
Language groups whose future is uncertain in the long term. In 3.
these cases, past experience suggests that the languages will die
out if nothing changes. Speakers do not appear to be committed to
the language, perhaps because they feel that they are socially and
economically disadvantaged by maintaining it. Peer pressure to use
the language is weak. Typically, child speakers are fewer than adults
in number as families pursue social mobility through shift.
Language groups that are contracting now. The languages are in 4.
imminent danger of disappearing. The younger generation have been
educated through another medium and have shifted. The youngest
monolingual speakers are aged 50+.
Groups that have shifted. The languages are either nearly extinct 5.
or completely extinct. In the former, the tiny number of surviving
monolingual speakers are very old. In the latter all mother tongue
speakers have died. The language may survive in written or recorded
form but it is now a dead language.

12.2.2 Responses to language loss

Languages can cease to be spoken for two reasons: the group that speaks
the language ceases to exist or the group that speaks the language shifts
to another language. The first case implies the destruction of the speaker
or the speakers’ habitat. This was what happened in the genocide that
took place in some European colonisation and what happened in Ireland
in the famines of the nineteenth century or in the Sahel in the famines
of the late twentieth century. Language death was a side effect of exploi-
tation, war and genocide or catastrophe; as the safety of a people was
threatened so was its language. Such language death must have occurred
frequently in history as small weak groups were conquered and displaced
by larger and stronger peoples or as natural disasters struck. Whether
groups were physically wiped out or became too small to exist as a
separate society, their languages disappeared. Pagel (1995) suggests that
perhaps 100,000 languages may have once been spoken by humans and
have since disappeared, probably in a violent way.

286 Language Policy and Language Planning

The second case is mutation not extinction. Here one group (A) in
contact with a second (B) disappears as a discrete group because it makes
the shift to B’s language. This can also result from oppression, but in
other kinds of contact there can be an element of choice. The reasons are
usually to be found in the imbalance of economic and political power
between the two, but the pressure can also derive from more positive
reasons: marriage, educational opportunity, professional advancement,
economic advantage. The shift can happen with or without overt pres-
sure from the more powerful group.

The violence of obliteration in the first case and the large degree of
external coercion and pressure found in a good deal of the second has
coloured much recent scholarship in the area. It is perhaps in conse-
quence that some of the language rights literature treats those who
become bilingual or who shift from a smaller to a bigger language as
pawns in globalisation or capitalist economics or dupes of nationalism.
There is sometimes a lack of recognition that it may be a considered
and conscious decision to accept language shift as the price to pay for a
desired move from one’s original group to the wider world. Depending
on the individual situation, shift can be associated with transcendence
rather than tragic loss. However, to date, understanding aspirations and
transcendence does not seem to have attracted as much research interest
as understanding coercive pressures and loss. More investigation of pull
factors would be a very useful contribution to this debate.

More emphasis on this focus would also remind scholars and plan-
ners that the objects of LPLP are also agents, and their choices are
ultimately decisive in determining how language behaviour develops.
Speakers themselves are the ultimate arbiters of language revitalisa-
tion, and the other players need to be sensitive if they aspire to play a
role. The academic community can put the case and identify the vari-
ables but ultimately language maintenance is not their choice and they
can only help if they are asked to do so. The activists of the minority
group may have to compromise on goals if the rest of the group is not
committed to language revitalisation, and accepts shift and mutation of
identity to further other goals. A central government, that supports its
minorities, needs to understand the process it implements, if it is not to
have unlooked for results. These points are illustrated in the case studies
discussed below.

The position that a language group finds itself on the vitality
continuum, and an understanding of its aspirations will determine what
action can be taken to maintain or revitalise the language. There are
three possible options. 9

Endangered Languages 287

The first is to do nothing; accept changes in language use as normal.
Such a philosophy would perhaps reflect Edwards’ (1985: 86) assertion
that it is natural for language use to change, and ‘more reasonable to
consider group and individual identity altering … than it is to see the
abandonment of original or static positions as decay or loss’. Language
will adapt as speakers are in contact with others or in new situations.
Those holding this position would say that the dynamic and accommo-
dating nature of language and its users will always counter any attempt
to preserve a language as if it were an artefact in a museum, frozen in its
present state for all time. 10 The argument is also that one cannot pres-
surise people to give up life chances to revitalise or preserve a language
and that there has to be a reason beyond a simple desire to conserve.

The second option is to turn to scholarship. Linguists can preserve the
language, by documenting and recording as much data as possible. Then,
if the endangered language disappears as practice, it can still survive as
knowledge and system. People will know about it, even if no one uses
it as a medium. The arguments for such activities are, as discussed in
12.1.4, that they safeguard linguistic diversity and contribute to a knowl-
edge base for language universals. The Western idea that knowledge in
and of itself is valuable is at work here. Some 11 would see an implicit
ethical problem in the fact that such scholarly activity is likely to be of
little immediate benefit to the remaining speakers, who may feel their
ownership of the language under threat, as well as the language itself.

The third option is to attempt some sort of language salvage, revi-
talisation, or maintenance programme, depending on the position
of the language on the continuum of vitality. This would include
language development strategies, such as producing a written form of
the language; encouraging acquisition of the language and literacy in
it; using it as a medium of education; funding and encouraging literary
production; translating government and administrative documents into
it; funding media in it; requiring business and commerce to make their
services available in it; and other such tactics.

A number of the strategies for revitalisation will need the approval of
the state and may require changes in state law. Their implementation will
need extensive financial support from general taxation. Revitalisation of
a minority language is language policymaking and language planning at
a local level and the activities encompassed by it are the status planning,
corpus planning and acquisition planning usually undertaken by the
state: that is designating the language as a medium in certain institutions
(status planning); making the language fit for that purpose, by codifying
and standardising it (corpus planning); educating speakers to use it in

288 Language Policy and Language Planning

both written and spoken forms (acquisition planning). Where an organ
of civil society undertakes the role of promoting the language, then it
will need to do so under the aegis of the state. Little can happen here if
the governing elite or the dominant group is opposed to extended use
of the minority language or subscribes to the ideology of the ‘neutral’
state. 12 The activity may be judged balkanisation rather than a beneficial
promotion of diversity.

This has led a number of sociolinguists to argue that official support
for a language should be a key component of language maintenance
(Bourhis 2001; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). Other scholars concede that this
is true, but warn against too great a reliance on official intervention.
Fishman stressed that top-down policies cannot compensate for lack of
bottom-up support and that use in the family is ultimately more impor-
tant than use in institutions:

Endangered languages become such because of the lack of informal
intergenerational transmission and informal daily life support, not
because they are not being taught in schools. (Fishman 1997: 190)

Nettle and Romaine (2000: 39–40) agree and believe that state support
for the language and culture of a group relatively lacking in power does
not necessarily ensure the reproduction of a language unless other
measures are in place to ensure intergenerational transmission at home.
Romaine wrote elsewhere that:

looking to schools and declarations of official status to assist endan-
gered languages is much like looking for one’s lost keys under the
lamp post because that is where the most light appears to shine,
rather than because that is where they have been lost. Just as it is
easier to see under the lamp post it is far easier to establish schools
and declare a language official than to get families to speak a threat-
ened language to their children. Yet only the latter will guarantee
transmission. (2002: 04)

If use in the home is the key to language maintenance, community activ-
ists who want to maintain a language have to address the problems of
status linked to minority language use and the advantage bound up with
majority language use. Grillo (1989) believes that the attitudes of major-
ities towards minority groups can often be categorised as an ‘ideology
of contempt’. Basing his analysis on languages in Europe, he concluded
that any language that is not a language of state or power is despised by

Endangered Languages 289

non-speakers and that this attitude is sometimes transferred to its speakers.
In consequence, those who are not part of the dominant majority may
want to shift to acquire prestige (Joseph 1987). Nettle and Romaine (2000)
suggest that conferring power and thus prestige on a minority language
group is one of the surest ways of reversing language decline.

However, conferring power and prestige through designating a
language an official language may still not be sufficient to reverse decline.
The relative failure of Irish revitalisation in Ireland is one illustration of
Fishman’s point that official language promotion needs the backing of
families committed to intergenerational transmission and private use of
the language (O’Laoire 1996).

12.2.3 The variables in maintenance and loss

Edwards (1992) suggests, in a predictive typology, the sites where pres-
tige is located. The wide variety of variables that he identifies as playing
a role and the difficulty of altering circumstances in some of them is a
clear indication of the limitations of LPLP.

Edwards distinguishes 33 elements that favour language maintenance.
The best case scenarios fall broadly into the following areas:

1. The group is demographically secure, concentrated in an area, with a
tradition of endogamy and little in or out migration;

2. The geographical situation protects the integrity of the group and
inhibits contact;

3. The socio-economic status of speakers is high and a range of employ-
ment opportunities is available within the group, in the group
language;

4. The group has achieved political recognition, rights and a degree of
autonomy;

5. Some political life takes place in the language. Dominant and other
groups have a positive attitude towards the minority group;

6. The group is cohesive, practising a single religion and maintaining
cultural practices in the group language;

7. All generations of the group have high levels of competence in the
group language, which is the habitual language of the home and
transmitted intergenerationally;

8. The language has a standard written form and speakers are literate in
it. It is used in literary production, education and the media.

There are a number of variables in this list that no amount of state
support or group effort could affect. Geographical settings that isolate

290 Language Policy and Language Planning

the group and belief systems that discourage any exit from the group,
in particular exogamy, will always help maintenance, but cannot be
planned for. A large, healthy group that provides a choice of marriage
partners and an attractive bio-niche that supplies all the material needs
of the group are basic human desiderata. They will aid language main-
tenance if they promote stability and lessen the reasons to pursue pros-
perity and general human happiness outside the group.

Other variables depend heavily on the will of central government. If
the dominant group agrees to a measure of devolution and autonomy,
this will make a significant contribution to minority language main-
tenance. Where central government relaxes its hold and the group
achieves a measure of political control over their institutions, use of the
minority language can become the medium for civil administration, the
judiciary, education, the media and democratic forums with significant
effects on language revitalisation. This provides instrumental motiva-
tion for maintaining the language and reinforces the affective reasons
for maintenance. Where there is no devolution of power and where the
minoritised language does not become the language of that power, there
is usually attrition. Bourhis (2001) is one among many who has demon-
strated that even pluralism leads to language shift in the long term,
because social mobility in a pluralist society still requires that minorities
learn the dominant language.

The third set of variables in the typology derives from the economic
value attached to knowing and using the language. The central role of
economics in language maintenance is twofold. Where the group sees
itself as a group and defends its interests as a group, there are positive
effects for solidarity and group language maintenance. Where interests
are defended successfully, it remains possible to live economic life in
the minority language. Where the minority language is used in business
and industry, the language is an economic asset and becomes a language
which non-speakers want to acquire. The revitalisation of Welsh illus-
trates how this can happen. Devolution for Wales (1997), building on
the Welsh Language Act (1993), led to a legal framework for language
revitalisation. Government departments were required to make services
available in Welsh as well as English. Business and commerce followed
the lead of local government and took the voluntary decision to provide
bilingual services, seeing this as advantageous in a situation of national
self-confidence and enthusiasm. With more and more employment
hinging on bilingual competence, bilinguals increasingly found them-
selves in a position of economic advantage. English monolingual families
became more willing to choose bilingual education for their children.

Endangered Languages 291

The results of the 2001 census record that there was growth in those
claiming knowledge and use of Welsh with 21 per cent stating that they
were able to speak it. In the 2011 census the percentage claiming to
speak Welsh fell to 18.5 per cent but the percentage declaring that they
had some knowledge of Welsh was 74 per cent. The economic advan-
tage of knowing Welsh, allied to an increasingly positive image of the
nation, seems to have affected patterns of identity with many identi-
fying themselves as Welsh rather than British, and exhibiting this orien-
tation by choosing to claim some knowledge of Welsh, even if they do
not consider themselves competent speakers.

One factor in these patterns of identification may well have been the
creation of the Welsh Assembly, which took power after elections in
2007. Responsibility for education, health, local government, trans-
port, planning, economic development, social care, culture, environ-
ment, agriculture and rural affairs was devolved to the Assembly and
government with central government in London retaining control of
police, prisons and the justice system, defence, national security and
foreign affairs. With so much power devolved the political conditions
strengthen the economic conditions propitious for the maintenance of
the language of the territory.

Other variables have also contributed to the vitality of the Welsh
language. The informal networks of civil society, religion, cultural
production and sport have been influential for revitalisation. There is
also a tradition of pride in history and culture within the group, and
a custom of using the language for literature, in particular song and
poetry. However, these elements were present in the years when there
was a decline in the use of Welsh and a language shift to English that
seemed irreversible. They do not appear to have been adequate on their
own to ensure language survival. Economic and political factors seem to
have been necessary to halt the shift to English monolingualism.

12.3 The problems of small groups and language
maintenance

These are dispiriting findings for all those committed to maintaining
the language of their group, but who have no prospect of achieving
the political independence and socio-economic buoyancy that seem
to guarantee success. The evidence seems to be building incontrovert-
ibly that once again the tactics suggested for language maintenance and
language revitalisation are not materially different from those under-
taken in nation building, if perhaps on a smaller scale.

292 Language Policy and Language Planning

Now, out of the 4500 or so groups whose languages are threatened, few
are engaged in struggles for self-determination. Few are large enough to
have the political clout to gain autonomy or to sustain it. Many have
no aspirations to do so. Many are penetrated by other speakers and to
achieve autonomy and then employ the strategies of nation building
would simply produce new inequalities. The kind of solutions devel-
oped in nationalism are not appropriate where groups are nested one
inside the other like the proverbial Russian doll. There will need to be
new solutions other than endless fracturing. We shall return to this in
the conclusion. Before doing so, let us look at three case studies that
illustrate how difficult it would be to implement the kind of strategies
for reversing language shift and revitalising language that those working
on endangered language revitalisation often suggest.

12.3.1 Development and the end of isolation

Many small languages have survived because of the isolation of their
speakers. Whaley (2002) documents how development and the end of
isolation have caused language shift among the Oroqen, a group living
on the north-west frontier of China. The Oroqen were originally a
nomadic hunter-gatherer people, organised in a number of clans, that
arrived in the frontier area of the Hinggan mountains sometime in the
seventeenth century. Whaley cites sources that estimate their number at
around 4000 before the Second World War.

Under the communist regime, their situation altered radically. In the
first decades of the PRC, there were positive attitudes to minorities and
minority rights were enshrined in legislation. These rights were based
on the territorial principle and resulted in the creation of autonomous
regions, prefectures and counties for minority groups. The Oroqen were
allotted the Oroqen Autonomous Banner, and thus became a group
identified with a clearly defined territory for the first time. The Chinese
government instituted a number of measures to raise the standard of
living of minorities, including the provision of health care and educa-
tion. One aspect of this policy was the settlement of nomads so that
children could be schooled. The Oroqen ceased being nomadic in the
late 1950s and began to settle in villages (Whaley 2002).

Other aspects of modernity altered traditional ways. In order to
exploit natural resources, the Beijing government sent large numbers of
workers into the area, mostly Han Chinese. To transport resources and
products out of the area, Beijing built roads and rail track. The new infra-
structure and industrial activity had a number of effects. In particular,
the increased population density and the network of roads affected the

Endangered Languages 293

Oroqen hunting grounds. It became more difficult to live by the old
methods and increasingly easy to live by the new. In a few decades, the
Oroqen went from living through hunting to participating in the PRC
economic system, from being an isolated group, numerically dominant
in the area, to a tiny minority (1 per cent) in most of the villages and
cities that they inhabit (Whaley 2002).

By its own criteria, the state treated minorities well in a number
of ways. First, secondary education was free for them and there were
quotas to guarantee minimum minority numbers at university. A rela-
tively high proportion of Oroqen thus went through the Chinese educa-
tion system. Second, the Oroqen, like other minorities, were exempt
from the national one child per family policy. Third, to encourage them
to settle, many Oroqen were housed in government built houses, which
were of good standard for the region. These various advantages meant
that the Oroqen became relatively pro-government and never felt the
need to mobilise as a group to defend their interests. 13 They also gave
the group relative prosperity and standing which have been incentives
to non-Oroqen to marry into the group. The Oroqen found themselves
in a classic melting pot situation and there has been a massive language
shift from Oroqen to Chinese in a few decades.

As the Oroqen became conscious that their language was not being
transmitted to the next generation, there were initiatives for basic
Oroqen language classes in school and on children’s television to give
the children of the community some familiarity with, if not competence
in, Oroqen. These were not an unqualified success, mainly because
Oroqen is a collection of dialects rather than a unitary language with
a standard form. The acquisition programmes each based their course
on one of the dialects and this alienated other Oroqen groups who did
not recognise their own idiom in the form taught. 14 This is the problem
experienced by the Galicians and the Basques discussed in Chapter 11,
and indeed wherever speakers of a set of dialects set about devising a
standard language that can serve them all. Some of the group will be
speakers of a variety far from the norm adopted and, unless there is a
compelling reason for accepting it, may not do so. Standardisation may
be rejected by those who do not recognise it as their speech.

The case study illustrates how even where the political elite of a state
has shown some support for minorities, 15 there can still be language
shift. Whaley believes that it may even have been the government’s
treatment of them as a minority group that actually weakened their
identity patterns and made assimilation more likely. As highly inde-
pendent and fluid hunter groups, speaking related dialects of the Oroqen

294 Language Policy and Language Planning

language, they did not originally see themselves as a unified group. The
various policies of the PRC, however, treated them as if they were. Being
conceived as an entity was as much a new development for the Oroqen,
as settlement, work in a cash economy, education, intermarriage and
all the other innovations that they have experienced. Now language
revitalisation also requires them to see themselves as unified. It may not
happen if the very recognition of group membership itself constitutes a
break with the past.

12.3.2 The disappearance of a language and its speakers

The language in the next case study is as endangered as the Oroqen
dialects but the reasons for this are quite different. The Uru of Iru-Itu in
the Bolivian Altiplano did not lose their language because of economic
development but through lack of it. The community where it was spoken
almost disappeared after a period of natural disaster and hardship.

The Uru live on the banks of the river that flows between Lake Titicaca
and Lake Poopo, surrounded by Aymara-speaking peoples. There are
three Uru languages/dialects, Uchumataqu, Murato and Chipaya, and
they appear to be distinct from surrounding languages (Muysken 2002).

The Uchumataqu community was decimated after a three-year
drought between 1939 and 1942, which caused death and dispersal. ‘In
1942 only six men and a few women, all elderly remained’ (Muysken
2002) quoting Vellard (1954). The tiny size of the group and the fact that
the women were past childbearing age meant that the men who had
remained sought wives outside the group. These women were Aymara-
speaking and this became the main language used in the new families.
Muysken (2002), again drawing from Vellard (1954), suggests that in the
area the prestige of Aymara was then higher than that of Uchumataqu,
the dialect of Uru spoken by the community. The mothers did not raise
their children to speak ‘a despised dialect’ (Vellard 1954: 93).

In 2001, Pieter Muysken worked with the villagers to record what
elements of the language the community could remember. 16 He reports
that there are no speakers for whom Uchumataqu is a first language
and the reconstruction depended on the memories of those who have
passive or partial knowledge of the language. Muysken records that
there was little consensus and much imprecision among his informants.
There were unbridgeable gaps where memories failed and some lexis
could not be recalled. Those who remembered some of the language had
experienced the fundamental problem of maintaining competence in a
situation of shift. De Bot (2001) suggests that language loss is a spiral.
If there are few opportunities to use the language because of dwindling

Endangered Languages 295

numbers of interlocutors and decreasing domains, there will be loss of
language ability deriving from the shrinking occasions when the speaker
employs the language. It will take longer to retrieve words for objects
in the language that is undergoing attrition, which insecurity in itself
discourages use of the language. There is a demographic point at which
this process begins. The process is then immensely difficult to reverse.
The critical mass factor not only affects competence in the language but
motivation to improve competence. If there are few interlocutors and
few domains, why maintain the language?

In this situation it is interesting to speculate why the Uru are taking
steps to revitalise Uchumataqu. Muysken suggests a possible motivation.
The Uru have been part of the tremendous labour migration from the
Altiplano. This migration is seasonal rather than definitive and those
involved return regularly. The contact with the wider world has given
both the desire and finance for modernisation. Iru-Itu is no longer a
poor community, but amongst the most prosperous and innovative in
the region, ‘looked upon with some jealousy and respect by their Aymara
neighbours’ (Muysken 2002). There is now reason to feel proud of group
membership. Moreover, there has been significant ethnic mobilisation in
Bolivian politics since the mid-1990s in which the neighbouring Aymara
have been major players. In their turn, the Uru are becoming more self-
aware, either because of rivalry with or emulation of the Aymara. Desire
to remember the language and record it may reflect a new pride in group
membership. Muysken recognises the limits of what can be done:

It would not be a purely automatic and unconscious reversal of a
process of language shift, of course. That shift took place much too
long ago for that, and the language is too far gone. It would be
a conscious effort to give the language its place alongside, not in
place of, Aymara and Spanish. It would involve the activities of a
small group of cultural brokers, community leaders, and be linked
to processes such as folklorisation and musealisation of Uru culture.
It would also need to be a modern development, relying on literacy
and possibly even on modern media. For some, this makes the
possible revitalisation of Uru unreal, artificial or suspect. However,
it may be the way in which many such revitalisation processes
take place in different parts of the world. Situations such as that of
the Uru and the Uchumataqu language cast doubt on traditional
notions of authenticity and spontaneity, and show that even rural
communities are capable of ‘language planning’. (Muysken 2002:
313–14)

296 Language Policy and Language Planning

Muysken does not mention another possible factor that may be contrib-
uting to this desire for revitalisation among the Uru. Those who work
outside the village are in contact not with Aymara speakers but with
Spanish, possibly English, speakers. There may be a possibility that where
the language that one needs for work is far removed from the cultural
base, the desire to cultivate a language of identity becomes stronger.
This seems to be an effect associated with globalisation and is an issue to
which I will return in the conclusion.

12.3.3 Status and literacy

The third example of an endangered language is taken from a study
carried out by Eda Derhemi in Europe. Piana Arbresh is a dialect of the
variety of Albanian currently spoken in five communities in Sicily. 17
The Arbresh-speaking population in Piana degli Albanesi numbers
about 7000 (Derhemi 2002). Arbresh has been the language of the
community for the past 500 years, since the Albanians came to settle
in Sicily. Derhemi suggests that the reasons for its survival derive in
part from the fact that the Albanians were Orthodox Christians among
a Catholic population. They maintained their religion and practised
endogamy, which kept them a separate and cohesive group. Other
factors encouraging maintenance included the relative prosperity of
the group; the issue of status worked for the minority rather than
against it, since the Albanians were rather contemptuous of the rural
Sicilian majority and dissociated themselves from the surrounding
population. The prosperity and confidence of the Piana degli Albanesi
group contributed to the survival of Albanian in the town and may be
the significant variable missing in the other centres where Albanians
settled, but which have not conserved the language into the twenty-
first century. 18

Arbresh speakers appear to be in a much stronger position of language
vitality than either the Oroqen or the Uru. Despite their centuries long
contact with Italian/Sicilian speakers, they conserved their language
and maintained stable diglossia. In addition, Law 482/1999 19 passed
by central government gave them legal instruments to strengthen their
position and put them in a position to promote Arbresh in new settings.
In particular it was now possible to use Arbresh in school. The status and
prestige of the language appeared undiminished.

At the turn of the century Derhemi reported, however, a general
perception in Piana degli Albanesi that the use of Arbresh was declining,
both in the number of domains in which it was used and among younger
speakers. Having witnessed ‘the semispeakers or non-proficient Arbresh

Endangered Languages 297

speakers’ in other communities, community leaders determined to work
to stem attrition in Piana itself (Derhemi 2002).

The principal thrust in the language maintenance programme was
the introduction of courses in and through Arbresh in the schools.
This had the support of the majority of parents according to a survey
conducted in 2001 (Derhemi 2002). Arbresh would be used in the
earliest years of primary education as the language of school socialisa-
tion, which would formalise a practice that already existed as teachers
provided a bilingual bridge for Arbresh-speaking children. In addition,
older students would be able to acquire literacy in Arbresh in more
advanced classes.

Despite these various indicators of the vitality of Arbresh, there
were two obstacles which needed to be overcome if the language was
to survive in the long term. The first problem was the absence of
an agreed standard written language, which meant that the educa-
tional initiatives were delayed while the community negotiated an
agreement on what this should be. There were two camps: those who
believed that a standard should be developed for the 7000 Arbresh
speakers in Sicily and those who argued that it made more sense to
adopt the written standard of Albania, which existed already and
which gave access to wider sources and contacts, and a more exten-
sive literature.

This dilemma has similarities to the case of the Galicians, described
in Chapter 11. The ready-made standard is exterior and slightly alien.
Opponents to its adoption reason that there is little point in strug-
gling to conserve a language if what is conserved is not the group’s
language but another, which, although close in many ways, is alien
in others. They argue that the differences between standard Albanian
and Arbresh cannot be treated as negligible and that adopting it would
create a situation of double diglossia for Arbresh speakers. The other
solution, to codify and standardise Arbresh has also attracted strong
criticism. The problem is that the project was assigned to a small
group of scholars and poets who did not consult widely (Fieldwork
Italy 2002). The result is a highly literary standard that would need to
be introduced top-down to speakers. The first school texts produced
in it were ill received. Teachers reported that their pupils found the
language difficult to understand and did not relate it to what they
actually spoke (Derhemi 2002). The controversy and the subsequent
slow rate of progress in producing texts is a key reason for the slow
implementation of the educational initiative. Moreover, informants
(Fieldwork Italy 2002) suggested that the highly public arguments

298 Language Policy and Language Planning

were likely to drive those families where use of Arbresh is fading even
further away from the language.

This brings us to the second problem for language maintenance in the
group. The point has been made several times in this text, that percep-
tions of status and prestige are key to intergenerational transmission
and language loyalty. Among Arbresh speakers a very keen pride in
group membership seems to have been a major reason for the survival of
the language. In much of the twentieth century, contact with Albanians
from Albania was minimal and in the communist period links were cut
entirely. Since the opening up of Albania, Italians’ attitudes towards
their neighbours across the Adriatic have fluctuated. In 1997 there was
widespread support for those opposing the regime and a warm reception
for the first refugees who crossed the Adriatic in small boats to leave the
crumbling communist regime. In the years since then, many Albanians,
particularly young men, have entered Italy, mostly in search of work
and mostly without the papers to allow them to do so. Their difficult
position in the margins of economic activity has produced an impres-
sion among the Italian majority that they are employed illegally in the
black economy and may even be involved in criminal activities. Italian
prejudice against Albanians has grown, with the result that, however
justified or unjustified this attitude may be, association with Albania,
Albanian and Albanians may have become less attractive at the present
time. 20 Semi-speakers of Arbresh may be less motivated to take steps
to improve their competence and to work to maintain the Arbresh-
speaking community in Piana degli Albanesi, if they feel the language
associates them with a community that is the object of majority suspi-
cion or racism. In 2014 Derhemi placed Arbresh speakers at 3 on the
five point probability of survival scale, in other words intergenerational
appeared to have broken down.

12.4 The difficulties of implementing universal
linguistic rights

Bratt Paulston (1997: 82) suggests that claims for universal language
rights may ‘merely serve to weaken potential rights since many claimed
rights patently cannot be enforced in some situations’. The three studies
in this chapter demonstrate that many of the strategies suggested for
language revitalisation (Fishman 2001) are not an option for the Uru,
the Oroqen, or even possibly for the Sicilian Arbresh speakers. These
groups cannot copy language groups that have fought their way out of
subjugation and which are commonly held up as models. The Welsh,

Endangered Languages 299

the Catalans, the Basques that I have used as examples of successful
revitalisation of ‘minority’ languages are not in the same situation as
the Uru and the Oroqen. The languages of the latter are among the
4500 under threat; the former are not. Even Arbresh speakers, with some
legal recognition in Italy, larger and more concentrated numbers of
speakers, and closely related to a language which is national and official
in another state, are not in a comparable position. There is a continuum
along which the likelihood of revitalising or maintaining a language
grows, closely related to whether the group takes or is accorded some
measure of political independence. The probability of maintaining the
language diminishes for many practical reasons of doability as well as
conscious repression.

Without the political muscle to gain separate development, minori-
ties depend entirely on dominant majorities being ready and willing
to confer on the language of the weaker group the necessary prestige
(Grillo 1989) and utility (May 2002) for long-term stable bilingualism. If
majorities refuse to accept arrangements that allow languages to coexist
within the same space, minorities with little power can do little to fight
their case. Of the four ideological approaches to dealing with a multicul-
tural/multilingual state, 21 even pluralism which is founded on equality
and even-handedness and which is the most favourable to minorities
cannot guarantee bilingualism and minority language survival.

Pluralist regimes ensure that minorities enjoy freedom from interfer-
ence and provide positive support, for instance, by funding the cultural
and linguistic activities of the minority in the same way that it does
for the majority. The pluralism ideology works with the concept of
‘reasonable accommodation’ (Bourhis 2001: 11) and it is assumed that
the cultures of the dominant majority and that of linguistic minorities
will be more or less transformed by the sustained contact between these
communities:

However, it is acknowledged that by virtue of their weaker vitality
position, linguistic minorities are more likely to be transformed by
such contact in the long run, than is likely to be the case for the
dominant majority. (Bourhis 2001: 11)

Thus, in practice, even pluralism may not be robust enough to change
perceptions of prestige within and towards the weaker group and main-
tain distinction.

A number of scholars have pointed out the symbolic nature of much
policymaking in pluralism. Schiffman (1996) suggests that central

300 Language Policy and Language Planning

authorities of the state are often cynical in that they grant status to
languages that are fast disappearing. Where a policy appears to be
accommodating linguistic pluralism, it is often symbolic and little
actual planning follows from the declaration. May (2001) criticises
pluralist policymaking for often being grandiose but delivering little. It
rarely changes the power relationships. Romaine (2002) cites the Native
American Languages Act of 1990 as a classic example of a policy where
the rhetoric is not reflected in measures to implement the law. She also
notes that where official support comes too late, after the community
has ceased to transmit the language, there is no threat to the status quo.
This is probably why it is allowed to happen and may account for an
apparent increase in support for pluralism. So we should be aware that
state support for minority language maintenance may be meant to be
token.

The other state ideologies found in multilingual states either reject
language rights or, where they appear more supportive may actually
derive from rather sinister reasons. Civic and assimilationist ideolo-
gies both promote the language of the dominant group, along with its
culture, attitudes and core values, although the rhetoric of the former
sounds more egalitarian. Their inclusivity leads to an intolerance of
difference. Ethno-nationalist ideology may support language rights for
minorities living among the majority, but the price the latter pay for
this has often be exclusion. 22 The minority has been marginalised, or in
the worst cases, held in enclaves (apartheid, reserves), expelled (ethnic
cleansing) or even physically eliminated (genocide) (Bourhis 2001). It is
the separate development required in a system of apartheid or reserves
that allows the language of the minority group to be taught within the
group. Indeed it serves the marginalisation and differentiation desired.
Language provision for allochthonous minorities can help to prepare an
immigrant group for return to the country of origin when they are no
longer required as a workforce.

There is thus a fundamental dilemma; the more desirable current
state ideologies all encourage linguistic shift in the minority group. The
alternative, marginalisation within the state, is a high price to pay for
language maintenance. In the setting of the strong state, the only way
to acquire the prestige necessary for maintenance without marginalisa-
tion, seems to be to go it alone. The coexistence of languages without
hierarchy is claimed for certain societies where language is exclusively
oral and interaction face-to-face (Fairhead 1994), but it does not seem an
option where there is a strong state or a literate culture. Even where stable
bilingualism can be maintained there is still diglossia. The hierarchical

Endangered Languages 301

arrangement of languages seems to be the price that societies pay for
universal literacy and education, social mobility and free movement of
citizens, and an inclusive political system and democratic participation.
The interesting question to ask is whether there will be any change in
this, if the state weakens as structures become more global.

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Culture & Society- International Perspective
Language and Language Policy

A Global Perspective
INTL 101

Language policy in formal education II

University of California, San Diego
Justin D. McIntosh

Portions of the slides were adopted from Priyanka Biswas & Gabriela Caballero

Language Policy in Education

2

This week: Language Policy in education –
Walter & Benson’s:
Language Policy & the medium of instruction in formal education
We will cover the following concepts:
• Language ideology
• Other reasons for brining languages into formal education
• Claiming of legal rights
• Proper advocacy
• Rights based arguments
• Research on the impact of first language instruction
• Costs and effectiveness

Language and education

3

Mother-tongue-based multilingual education

• Search for regional national coherence and/or identity
• Belief that each nation-state should have one single unifying language
• Led colonizer countries to suppress their own linguistic diversity
• e.g.: Welsh, Irish, Basque, Catalán, Breton, Frisian …

• Colonized peoples have been robbed of the opportunity to express
themselves in their own languages, particularly in writing.

(Mazrui

19

97, Ngūɡī 1987, Prah 2003)

• Eritrea policy makers made choices about the use of language in early
education to maximize effectiveness of education – address low
achievement and high drop out rates

Language and education

4

Mother-tongue-based multilingual education

• Product of political ideology
• School use of mother tongue has been a product of political ideology
• Tanzania
• Indonesia
• Ethiopia
• Guinea

• Radical approaches yielded positive results for education
• Development of consistent ideologies involving people’s languages
• Enrichment of school curricula that responds to societal needs
• Development of indigenous languages in education and public life

Language and education

5

Mother-tongue-based multilingual education

Product of political ideology
• Guinea – national language ended with Touré’s administration
• Tanzania – Kiswahili offers access to basic education and social

participation but spaces have not opened-up for learners’ mother tongues
• Public seems to be leaning towards English-medium education

• Ethiopia – Use of Amharic has led to public demand for other national
languages in education –
• Adopted in mother-tongue-medium education for 8 years

• Eritrea – Political leaders found it ‘educationally expedient’ to propose a
model of universal first language education to unify the country
• Resulted in use of first language in education for 95% of school aged population

Language and education

6

Mother-tongue-based multilingual education

Other reasons for bringing languages into formal school system
To reclaim social and cultural identity
• European regional languages (Basque and Irish)

• Thailand and the use of Chong (1999)
• Community initiated project to promote and revive the use of Chong

• Aim:
– To raise the status of the language

– To increase its usage

– To pass it on to the younger generation

Language and education

7

Mother-tongue-based multilingual education

Other reasons for bringing languages into formal school system
To reclaim social and cultural identity
• Thailand and the use of Chong (1999)

• With the technical assistance of Thai university linguists
• Adult Chong speakers developed a writing system’
• Produced instructional materials
• Trained to become teachers

• In 2002 Chong became the first minority language in Thailand to be taught in
formal education

• Subject of study as part of the ‘local curriculum’ component

Language and education

8

Mother-tongue-based multilingual education

Other reasons for bringing languages into formal school system
The claiming of legal rights

• European regional minority language communities
• Basque –

• Gained autonomy through the Spanish Constitution of 1978
• Officially recognized in 197

9

• Developed educational programs with Basque-medium education

• 1992 European Charter for Regional Minority Languages
• Subject of study as part of the ‘local curriculum’ component

Language and education
9
Mother-tongue-based multilingual education
Other reasons for bringing languages into formal school system
The claiming of legal rights

• 1992 European Charter for Regional Minority Languages
• Signed and ratified by 24 countries

• Calls for governments to recognize and promote regional and minority languages
• Eliminate all forms of discrimination against them and their speakers
• Provide opportunities for their use in educational programs at all levels (Article 8)
• Allowed for many linguistic communities to move forward even where national

policies have been inconsistent
• Universal declaration of Linguistic Rights (1996 UNESCO)

• Supports the rights of endangered language communities to acquire a full
command of their own language

Language and education

10

Mother-tongue-based multilingual education
Proper advocacy

Advocacy for dominant official languages & mother tongues in education

• Stakeholders are sensitive to language status issues

• Parents wish for their children to gain access to the language of power/prestige
• Which they believe will best prepare them for success and social mobility

• Bilingual education programs demonstrate that languages of power can be learned
by starting with learners’ first languages

Language and education

11

Mother-tongue-based multilingual education
Proper advocacy

Advocacy for dominant official languages & mother tongues in education
Experiments in countries like Bolivia and Mozambique create new demand for mother
tongue based multilingual education

• Bolivia – NGO sponsored experimentation
• Support for Bilingual intercultural education (EIB)
• Education reform and national implementation of EIB

• Mozambique – 5 years after initiation of bilingual experiment in Gaza and Tate
• Created local buzz of the regions’ families in anticipation
• In 2002 education reformed allowed for bilingual education attendance was greatest

from these regions –
• Bilingual schools currently operating in 16 Mozambican languages

Language and education

12

Mother-tongue-based multilingual education
Proper advocacy

Advocacy for dominant official languages & mother tongues in education
When poorly implemented can cause parents to lose faith in mother tongue use –

• Niger –
• Chronically low resourcing of bilingual schools which were called ‘experimental’ for

more than 30 years caused many parents to move their children to French-medium
education –

• Oaxaca, Mexico – The Chatino region
• Underprepared ‘bilingual’ teachers (not bilingual in the local language)
• Teach so-called ‘bilingual’ education only to Castilianize community youth –

• In the former Spanish colonies, the term is used in the linguistic sense of the
Spanish language replacing indigenous languages.

Language and education

13

Mother-tongue-based multilingual education
Rights based arguments

UNESCO – Mother tongue position is widely cited (1953)
Supported initial literacy and learning in the child’s home language on psychological and
pedagogical grounds

• Strengthened by other international conventions
• The 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

• Article 27 recognizes the right of minority people to use their own languages
• The 1989 ILO convention 169, Article 28 gives indigenous children the right to be

taught in the language most used by their communities
• The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 29 calls for education to

respect the child’s cultural identity, language and values
• The 1992 Declaration of the Rights of Persons belonging to National or Ethnic,

Religious and Linguistic Minorities
• 2001 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, Article 6, defines the educational

role of the mother tongue in promoting multilingualism

Language and education
Mother-tongue-based multilingual education
Research on the impact of first language instruction
in a developed nation (Thomas and Collier 1997, 2002)

– Students receiving not instructional support in
their first language completed their education
way below the norm
– 11th percentile in the worst case

– Those receiving six or more years of instruction
in their first language finished above the national
norm for all students including native English
speakers

14

https://www.thomasandcollier.com/articles

https://www.thomasandcollier.com/articles

Language and education
Workplace consequences of student performance
Research on the impact of first language instruction in a
developed nation (Thomas and Collier 1997, 2002)
– NCE equivalent divides the range of performance

into blocks based on the standard deviation (21 in
this case)

– Hypothetical blocks of 10,000 students are computed
for each level of performance

– ESL pullout model (no instructional support in 1st
language) > 10% scored 50% or higher
– Minimum for attending university

– Below this level is associated with blue-collar jobs,
manual labor, or unemployment

– 70% of students educated in two-way bilingual
programs scored at or above the mean
– Potential access to university and higher level of

professional careers
15

Language and education
Cost and cost effectiveness – Guatemala

1981 bilingual intercultural education in 4 largest
Mayan languages in Guatemala
– Beginning on the left

– Column 1 = # of children enrolled/grade
– Column 2 = # of children promoted/grade
– Column 3 = Percentage promoted (persistence rate)
– Column 4 = Total cost in US dollars

– Based on ministry of education per-pupil
expenditure of 145 US dollars

– Final column = cost/student promoted to the next
grade

– Bottom figure = total cost of producing one primary
school graduate in each model
– = total cost of 6 years / number of graduates

16

– Cost of educating a primary school graduate from a Spanish-medium school is $500 higher $3,077-$2,578
– First language education saves about $500 dollars per child

Language and education

17

Mother-tongue-based multilingual education
Conclusions:

Language policy and its way of specifying or privileging the use of certain
languages over others

• Because education is one of the most critical functions of language it is, perhaps,
the domain most sensitive to the choice made about language

• Reasons are various:
• Convenience
• Colonial influence
• Numerical superiority
• Political ideology
• Social prestige and advantage
• Religion and nation building
• Others…?

Focus on the following questions while
watching Speaking in Tongues

• What are some pros and cons of bilingualism and/or Language
immersion programs?

• What are some main reasons (i.e., experience and expectations)
for the parents to send their kids to these schools?

• How does it relate to the retention of a heritage language in the
US?

• How would policies like the ones in the film be enacted
globally or in other nations?

Questions?

19

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