Keywords

Linguistic diversity; Distances between languages; Fractionalization; Disenfranchisement; Conflict

JEL Classification Codes

D74; O12; O44; Z13

19.1 Introduction

In his book Decolonizing the Mind, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986, pp. 3–5) makes it clear why language is an essential expression of culture:

‘[T]he biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is the furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other peoples’ languages rather than their own.

The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to the entire universe. Hence language has always been at the heart of two contending social forces in the Africa of the twentieth century.’

In 1977, he stopped writing plays, novels, and short stories in English, and turned to Gikuyu and Kiswahili, two languages used in his native Kenya.¹ Decolonizing the Mind, published in 1986, and from which the quote is taken, was Ngũgĩ’s last text written in English. As an African, Ngũgĩ writes about the continent where he was born. However, similar stances and ideas hold for all other continents, be they North or Latin America, the Australasian world, some parts of Asia, and even Europe, which nolens volens is turning to a language that consists of a 1000-word English.

As we shall see, linguistic policies often tend to alienate groups of individuals whose cultural, societal, and historical values and sensibilities are perceived to be threatened by what we call linguistic disenfranchisement, as linguistic rights are restricted or even denied.

Why does man have such an intimate relation with his language? What is it that makes the famous Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa write that ‘[m]y homeland is my language’ or contemporary French linguist Claude Hagège (2000) claim that ‘[l]anguages are the flags of dominated people’ or that ‘[the] fight for French is a fight of the mind’? Why does political scientist Henry Bretton (1976, p. 447) suggest that the ‘fear of being deprived of communicating skills seems to raise political passion to a fever pitch’?

The suggestion that language is more than a means of communicating was first emphasized at the very beginning of the nineteenth century by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1988). It was further reinforced by anthropologist Franz Boas (1940), and linguists Edward Sapir (1949) and Benjamin Whorf (1956), and later came to be known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis: language and culture are interdependent, and the structure of the language that one uses (often as native language) influences the way of thinking and behaving. The consequences, summarized by Kramsch (1998, p. 12), imply that despite the possibility of translating from one language to another, ‘there will always be an incommensurable residue of untranslatable culture associated with the linguistic structures of any given language’. Whorf illustrates this by a couple of examples, such as the notion of ‘time’ in Hopi Indian and in English. This notion, he writes, is perceived so differently that a Hopi and an English physicist may have a hard time understanding each other.

This bold hypothesis (language determines the way we think) was rejected by the scientific community, since it would have led to the ‘relativity’ of scientific discoveries. Nowadays, a weaker hypothesis is thought to hold, namely that ‘there are cultural differences in the semantic associations evoked by seemingly common concepts. The way a given language encodes experience semantically, makes aspects of that experience not exclusively accessible, but just more salient for the users of that language’ (Kramsch, 1998, p. 13). In short, language reflects cultural preoccupations and constrains the way we think, and culture is expressed through the use of the language (Kramsch, 1998, p. 14). Language is thus not only a means of communication, but also a carrier of culture. Interestingly enough, this seems also to hold true to some extent for writing. According to Carriére and Eco (2009), in Western movies, traveling shots usually move from left to right, while in Iranian movies, they often go from right to left, following the way Persian is written. More generally, according to Steiner (1992, pp. xii–xiv):

‘Each human language maps the world differently. There is life-giving compensation in the extreme grammatical complication of those languages (for example, among Australian Aboriginals or in the Kalahari) whose speakers dwell in material and social contexts of deprivation and barrenness. Each tongue – and there are no ‘small’ or lesser languages – construes a set of possible worlds and geographies of remembrance. It is the past tenses, in their bewildering variousness, which constitute history.’

A recent paper by Chen (2012) analyzes the effect of language on economic behavior and finds that ‘languages which do not grammatically distinguish between present and future events² lead their speakers to take more future-oriented actions’: they save more, smoke less, are less likely to become obese, and are healthier in the long run.

Although language is a phenomenon that deeply affects culture and is affected by it, it can hardly describe by itself culture, but it is often used together with so-called ethnic characteristics as a reasonable proxy for measuring cultural differences, though it is by far not the only yardstick: Chapter 21 by Aldashev and Platteau and Chapter 20 by Schwartz in this volume are devoted to other dimensions of culture.

Two important empirical issues have to be tackled in studying diversity: (i) how does one measure cultural, ethnic, and linguistic differences, and (ii) how does one identify cultural groups (the so-called group identification issue) and the resulting fractionalization of the society.

The various aspects of cultures are hard to describe and so are the distances between cultures, though several attempts have been and are still being made by scientists to measure them. Here, we shall use language as a proxy for culture and/or ethnicity. There are of course exceptions. As Storti (2001) shows, there exist large cultural differences that may lead to sometimes dramatic misunderstandings even between Americans and Britons, though they speak (almost) the same language. The same is true for Flemish-speaking Belgians and Dutch people, though again there are some small linguistic differences. On the other hand, it seems difficult to find two peoples or countries that share the same culture, but speak different languages. Thus, broadly speaking, there is a one-to-one correspondence between languages and cultures, but linguistic diversity may be easier to apprehend than cultural diversity, since it is reasonably easy to check which native language is spoken and to measure distances between languages (see Section 19.2.1).

It is more difficult to find a one-to-one mapping between cultural groups and countries. These often result from artificial and imposed borders, and a specific country may host several linguistic groups, while a former linguistic group may be spread over several countries.³ As Laitin (2000, p. 143) points out, it is also true that ‘people have multiple ethnic heritages, and they can call upon different elements of those heritages at different times. Similarly, many people throughout the world have complex linguistic repertoires, and can communicate quite effectively across a range of apparently diverse cultural zones’. The importance of using native languages as identifiers of cultural groups is reinforced by Bretton (1976) who suggests that ‘[l]anguage may be the most explosive issue universally and over time. This mainly because language alone, unlike all other concerns associated with nationalism and ethnocentrism, is so closely tied to the individual self’. In fact, the first and most influential country-by-country identification widely known as ELF (ethnolinguistic fractionalization), conducted in the Soviet Union some 50 years ago (see Section 19.2.2), was based mainly on linguistic and historic origins of various groups, which, in many cases, are based on their native languages.

The mere presence of distinct linguistic groups is not necessarily a ‘bad thing’. As we will argue, a more diversified environment attracts creative individuals, ventures, businesses, and capital. The complementarities of workers’ skills can sometimes easily offset the costs of cross-cultural interactions. The European Union, which consists of 27 countries whose peoples speak many languages, has its problems, but it eliminated the threats as well as the actuality of military conflicts that were hovering in Europe for many centuries.

Linguistic as well as ethnic fractionalization or diversity could, however, also breed institutional wastefulness, bureaucratic inefficiency, and corruption, reduce political stability, and hamper economic growth, as shown by the sad and painful example of post-colonial Africa. How can a country (a region or a group of countries such as the European Union) deal with these negative aspects? A natural response often leads a fractionalized society to introduce a certain degree of standardization by adopting a smaller number of languages, including the possibility of one language that would be common to all. Standardization, however, creates disenfranchisement by depriving sometimes large segments of a society of their linguistic rights. In some cases, the disenfranchisement sentiment turns out to be relatively soft, as it was in France after the 1992 change of the Constitution that included an article imposing French as ‘the language of the Republic’. Linguistic discontent in Sri Lanka, however, resulted in a long and bloody war.

This chapter is organized as follows. Section 19.2 is devoted to ethnolinguistic diversity and fractionalization, their measurement, and their social and economic consequences. In Section 19.3 we turn to standardization policies that aim at reducing the economic losses due to excessive diversity. These policies may, however, lead to the linguistic disenfranchisement of large groups of a society, which could yield negative social and economic consequences, examined in Section 19.4. We conclude, in Section 19.5, with a discussion of the delicate balance between the goods and the ills of both diversity and standardization, and try to address the crucial question about how to sustain a manageable degree of diversity while implementing various standardization policies that may disenfranchise certain groups.

19.2 Linguistic Diversity and Fractionalization

The interdependence of language and culture captured by the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is related to the concept of a native language that plays a crucial role in defining the patterns of human reasoning and behavior. One may speak several languages (and many people do), but they appear not to be fully substitutable and usually only one is the mother tongue. The importance of using one’s native language is underlined in Mandela’s quotation in the epigraph to this chapter. Serious conflicts due to misunderstandings are common even if the same language is used by some whose native tongues, and thus cultures, differ. Storti (2001) illustrates this by collecting cross-cultural dialogs and analyzing how people from different cultures (French, Germans, Americans, and Britons) attach different interpretations to the same words and sentences, according to their native cultures.

To illustrate, Nabokov’s (1955) own translation of his Lolita from English to Russian did not make him very happy, but otherwise had no major consequences. These may, on the contrary, be extremely important as is shown by Lewis (2004) in From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East, where he describes the famous example of Article 1(i) of UN resolution 242 of 22 November, 1967, drafted several months after the war between Israel and its Arab neighbors (Egypt, Syria, and Jordan) ended. The resolution, initially drafted in English, requires the ‘withdrawal of Israeli Armed Forces from territories occupied during the recent conflict’. Lewis (2004, p. 194) suggests that:

…it has been argued, and generally, conceded, that the omission of the article ‘the’ before ‘territories’ in the English text means that not all the territories are intended. The Russian text, which has no article since none exists in Russian, leaves, like the English text, the question open. In the Arabic version – unofficial since at that time Arabic was not yet an official UN language – the article is present as a stylistic if not a grammatical necessity.

In French the text is concerned with a ‘retrait des forces armées israéliennes des territoires occupés’. In this sentence, the article des comes from the contraction of two words: the preposition de meaning from and the article les meaning the, and could be interpreted as ‘all the territories’. It is impossible to deny the historical importance of that linguistic discrepancy.

Bellos (2011, pp. 24–26) has a beautiful story that did not cost as much blood as the previous one. He starts by arguing that law ‘is written in a language of its own that is almost impossible to understand, and what can’t be understood can’t be translated’. He then describes the problem created by the French expression droits de l’homme, in English human rights and in German Menschenrechte. The only correct form is the last one, since in German there exists Mann for man, Frau for woman, but there also exists Mensch which has no gender-flavor. The French word homme means man and at some point feminists insisted to also benefit from droits de la femme. Since the word humain does not have the exact same meaning as human, the French decided to re-christen the old expression (which goes back to the French revolution of 1789) and call it droits de l’Homme, with a capital H, pretending that the capital makes it lose its gender and means Mensch.

These arguments have a somewhat surprising practical impact on the definition of the concept of diversity and its measurement. Indeed, it would be natural to partition a society into groups of speakers who share the same native language, since in most cases it is easier to identify individuals on the basis of their sole native language than of other characteristics. Then, however, comes the question about how different languages can be, to which we turn now.

19.3 Standardization

The negative aspects of fractionalization in a multilingual country or community are exacerbated by the substantial costs needed to maintain several (and sometimes a large number) of official languages. Even before the 2004 enlargement, the institutions of the European Union were the largest recruiter of interpreters and translators in the world. In 1999 the total translation and interpretation costs for the Commission alone amounted to some 30% of its internal budget.²⁸ The burden of maintaining official languages is not limited to the direct costs of translation and interpretation. Communication constitutes an even more serious challenge in societies with a large number of official languages. Errors as well as the delays caused by translations may end up paralyzing multilateral discussions and negotiations.

The basic principles of political accountability and equality among citizens require, however, that all or at least a substantial part of the full-fledged translation services will have to be maintained in some of the EU institutions (Council of the European Union, European Council, European Parliament). Failing to provide translation services by the European Union may simply shift the provision of the service to individual countries, leading to duplications that may raise the total cost of services,²⁹ as well as to divergent translations and interpretations.³⁰

This will often lead a fractionalized society to introduce some degree of standardization. This concept is present in Max Weber’s celebrated rationalization theory outlined in his 1914 essay (translated into English in 1968): the practices of state standardization include a common currency, a common legal system, and a common administrative language.

The modes of introducing standardization vary across countries and historical periods. An extreme and bloody way of imposing such a policy is what came to be called ‘ethnic cleansing’, which was unfortunately practiced on various occasions. A less extreme and apparently more manageable way of standardizing is to impose a unique language or to force citizens to speak a unifying language in addition to their native tongue. The central power can also abolish education in languages it does not favor.³¹ French was imposed on all French provinces in 1539 by King François I, though in 1794, Henri Grégoire³² showed that in 68 out of 83 local states (départements) another tongue was spoken next to French and French was spoken by only three million out of 28 million citizens. In 1972, French President Georges Pompidou claimed that there ‘was no place for regional languages in France, which is destined to play a fundamental role in Europe’. In 1975, a new law stipulated that French must be used in commerce, by the media, and by the public service. In 1994, the Toubon Act made French the compulsory medium in consumer affairs, employment, education, and at congresses held in France (Spolsky, 2004, pp. 66–67).³³

The russification of the territories of the Russian Empire is another example. In the mid–1800s, Lithuanian and Polish were banned from usage in public places, and later in schools and administrations. General Mikhail Muravyov, the Governor General of Lithuania, claimed that ‘what the Russian bayonet did not accomplish, the Russian school will’.³⁴ All students were required to study Russian and social mobility was not possible without being proficient in Russian.

A similar standardization was imposed in China. After the 1911 Revolution China began promoting a vernacular Chinese based on Mandarin as the national language. Within a few years it was understood that the Beijing pronunciation would be the new standard. In 1958, the government initiated a linguistic reform whose main goal was to simplify written Chinese and promote a ‘general language’ called Putonghua. It is interesting to point out that a similar unifying effort to encourage the Singapore Chinese community to adopt Mandarin had a mixed effect; according to the 2002 census, only 45% of Chinese families speak Mandarin at home, while the rest speak other Chinese dialects or English.³⁵

The attempt at enforcing a unique national language led to disastrous consequences in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), which shows how emotional, explosive, and dangerous the choice of official or national languages may become. Sri Lanka has two major ethnic and linguistic communities: the Sinhalese majority, predominantly Buddhist, and the Tamil minority, mainly Hindu,³⁶ who had peacefully coexisted over a period of about 2000 years. After 150 years under British rule, the island attained self-governance in 1948. The superior system of teaching English in northern Tamil regions allowed Tamils to have easier access and numerically disproportionate representation in university education and jobs in the prestigious government sector. According to deVotta (2004), in 1946, ‘Tamils made up 33% of the civil service and 40% of the judicial service. They also accounted for 31% of the students in the university system. In the medical and engineering fields, Tamils numerically equaled the Sinhalese’. The Sinhala-Only Act in 1956, considered by Tamil leaders as a form of apartheid, led to mass riots in which hundreds of people lost their lives. Brown and Ganguly (2003, p. 11) note that ‘the passage of the Sinhala-Only Act was a turning point in the Sinhalese-Tamil relations. Tamil grievances subsequently grew, because in Sri Lanka as elsewhere, language policies had wide-ranging implications for educational and economic opportunities’. The government later took a range of conciliatory measures in favor of the Tamil minority. However, this came too late and tens of thousands of lives were lost over the course of 26 years of a full-fledged civil war, which only recently came to an uneasy halt.³⁷

Bellos (2011, pp. 202–223) points out that there exist also cases in which the language that gains prestige is the language of the conquered, which may even crowd out the language of the conqueror in some cases. This was so when the Akkadians conquered Sumer around 2250 BC. They adopted the Sumerian script and Sumerian became the mark of educated people. This also happened to Greek in the Roman Empire.

Standardization does not necessarily refer to the imposition of a unique language, but rather to restricting the number of languages used for official, legal or educational purposes. An example of such a policy is the so-called three-language formula adopted in India some 50 years ago. It implied that children in Hindi-speaking states would study three languages: Hindi, English, and one of the regional, preferably Southern, languages, whereas children in non-Hindi-speaking states were to be taught Hindi, English, and their regional language.³⁸ The formula failed. The reasons were insufficient funding, lack of teachers, inadequate support of the regional administration, and little enthusiasm on the part of students and their families to undertake the required efforts to learn languages spoken in other regions. In Hindi regions, relatively little effort or resources were put into studying English and even less so in learning a third language. In Tamil Nadu, English and Tamil are studied quite extensively, whereas Hindi received lip service.

A variant of the three-language formula was introduced in Nigeria, the most populous African country with 141 million inhabitants who speak 527 languages³⁹ and are divided into 250 ethnic groups (Ethnologue, 2009). The three-language formula, based on the use of Hausa (18.5 million speakers), Yoruba (19 million), and Igbo (18 million), was considered a unifying device. Like in India, its implementation was inhibited by the lack of qualified instruction and the resistance of linguistic groups, identified with one language, that were forced to learn another major language.

Linguistic standardization inevitably restricts the usage of some languages that are not included in the set of the official ones, but its effects go much beyond restricting access to information. Standardization may alienate groups of individuals whose cultural, societal, and historical values and sensibilities are not represented by the official languages and consequently create linguistic disenfranchisement.⁴⁰ In the context of the European Parliament, for example (Report of Secretary General, document PE 305.269/BUR/fin, 2001):

…the right of an elected Member to speak, read and write in his or her own language lies in the heart of Parliament’s democratic legitimacy. The case for multi-lingualism is based not only on fairness to Members, from whichever country they are elected. It is necessary to ensure the support of citizens in all Member states; if Parliament does not recognize their language, it is less likely that citizens will recognize it as being their Parliament.

In short, standardization breeds disenfranchisement. However, how does one balance the effects of standardization and disenfranchisement? In the next section we examine several aspects of this important question.

19.4 Disenfranchisement

Before proceeding, we need to stress two important points. (i) Linguistic or ethnic fractionalization studied in Section 19.2 was implicitly considered to be exogenous and used as explaining the impact it had on economic outcomes such as trade, migrations, literary translations, growth, quality of governments, corruption, or military conflicts. ELF, for instance, represents a snapshot description of linguistic partitions existing across the globe in the 1960s. Of course, fractionalization had evolved before that: some languages had disappeared, while others were born over time as consequences of trades, migrations, wars, and others reasons, including voluntary or non-voluntary standardizations that are pervasive in our history and pre-history. Standardization gives way to new partitions that will at some point in 50 or 100 years be considered as exogenous, though they are no more exogenous than those that we studied in Section 19.2. (ii) The considerations on disenfranchisement that will follow can be seen as ex post measures about who speaks what, but also as a way of studying the possible consequences of proposed standardization policies.

Linguistic disenfranchisement is essentially based on the fact that the languages of some linguistic groups are not included in the list of official languages. In describing the linguistic situation in Africa, Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas (1995, p. 335) offer the following very blunt and succinct assessment that ‘[t]he majority of Africans are governed in a language that they do not understand’.

The statement, however, applies in many other circumstances and serves as basis for the quantitative analysis of linguistic disenfranchisement, which is presented below.

We now consider a multilingual society that faces the challenge of selecting a subset of languages to be used in official documents, for communication between institutions and citizens, debates in official bodies, etc. Call these languages core languages. Their choice may have a major negative impact on the well-being of some members by limiting their access to laws, rules and regulations, and debates in their elected or legislative bodies. In some cases these limitations could even violate the basic principles of the society. To determine the optimal set(s) of core languages, one has to weigh the costs and the benefits of linguistic standardization, but here we merely focus on the construction of disenfranchisement measures and their use to simulate results that can help politicians to decide on a ‘satisficing’ set of official languages.⁴¹

19.5 Concluding Remarks

The role of culture in affecting economic outcomes has recently become the issue of intensive interest in various branches of economics.⁵⁰ Our main focus was linguistic diversity as one of the important aspects of cultural heterogeneity.

The issue of linguistic diversity can be traced back to the well-known mythological attempt of a monolingual ‘people’ to build the Tower of Babel to be closer to the sky. God disliked the idea and confused the builders so that one person could no longer understand another. Today most countries are (still) multilingual (with notable exceptions, such as North Korea) and the challenges of multilingual societies persist everywhere.

It is often argued that linguistic diversity represents an impediment to economic progress and institutional development of all sorts. To address this question, one needs to quantify linguistic fractionalization. This, in turn, requires a way of dividing a society into distinct groups, and possibly taking into account ‘how much’ distinct they are, by using linguistic (or other types of) distances. To mitigate the negative impact of linguistic fractionalization, societies have often chosen to standardize by reducing the number of official languages. The numerous examples of such standardization policies (in the Russian Empire, India, and Sri Lanka, among many others) often lead to the feeling of disenfranchisement experienced by some population groups. The American-Chilean professor and writer Ariel Dorfman (2002, p. 92) describes those feelings in the context of the ascendency of English by arguing that it restricts the access of many to her or his own language, leaving:

…too many invisible losers, too many people silenced. Do you come from a place that does not control a language that commands respect? Do you reside in a language whose existence does not have the kind of value in the marketplace that can get you a good job and help you in everyday’s struggle to survive?

The search for a compromise between efficiency and the sentiment of being disenfranchised represents a serious challenge for any multilingual country or union. In this chapter, we have considered a formal analysis of linguistic disenfranchisement and have described how it can help in analyzing linguistic policies, using as example the European Union, which has to cope with 23 official languages. The aim of the chapter was to formally examine two opposing forces: standardization and efficiency, on the one hand, and cultural attachment and linguistic disenfranchisement, on the other, and to outline ways of bringing them to balance each other.

Many problems remain open, in particular the speed at which people acquire languages, forgetting their own mother tongue, as well as the speed at which languages change and become ‘new’ languages in our globalizing world. Chapter 17 on the dynamics of cultural changes by Bisin and Verdier in this Handbook sheds light on how this issue can be tackled.

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